Revenge12 min read
My Name Was Never Mine
ButterPicks17 views
I was ten the first time someone called me anything but "the runt" or "little pest."
My name was a sound, a silly syllable adults used when no one else was near: "Janessa," they never said it, so I said "I" and the house listened.
"Don't go down there," Wilma warned as she tightened my sleeve.
"I want to see her," I whispered.
"Don't say that name," Wilma spat. "She killed people."
"Who?" I asked, voice small as a mouse.
"She," Wilma said, and her face went hard like a rock. "Your mother."
"Mom?" I said. The word fell flat in the hallway like a dropped toy.
"You call her that again and I will show you what happens to traitors," she warned, and she dragged me away as if I were a loose thread.
He was in his office, as always, when I found the courage to ask that night. Augusto sat behind the desk, the dark light of the hall painting his face careful and cold. He didn't touch me the way other people touched a child—he touched problems, money, decisions.
"Why can't I see her?" I asked, trembling.
He watched me for a long time. "Because she is not fit," he said at last. "She is not like us."
"She is my mother."
"Not to me," he answered, but then he did a thing no one had done in my life—he nodded. "I will let you see her."
I ran ahead, my small feet thumping like a secret. The basement door was a cold mouth. I peered through the iron grid and saw a woman on a single metal bed, pale as a candled statue. She didn't move when I spoke.
"Mom?" I breathed.
Her eyes roamed, slow as a tide. She looked beautiful even from a distance, and I thought she looked like every soft woman in old shows: kind, gentle, impossible to fear.
"Mom," I tried again, louder.
She didn't answer. She did not cry, did not smile. She watched me like someone who had learned to watch without feeling.
"She killed your family," Wilma hissed when she dragged me back. "She killed your grandfather, your uncles… she tried to kill you and everyone else."
"She isn't like that," I said, clutching at the idea like a life raft. "She wore dresses. She smelled like flowers."
"Flowers," Wilma said with a single laugh that had no humor. "She used flowers to hide the poison."
My birthday that year carried no cake. No candles. The house moved around me like a beast that had all my future sorted into ledgers and safe boxes. But that night, with a small, trembling hope, I learned two things: my mother had been called a cop—an infiltrator—and the world could be cruel enough to lock a woman in a cellar for ten years because of what she had done and what he suspected.
"She was the first to fall in love with him," Foster said one night, his breath smelling of cheap wine. He was the man everyone called Little East Uncle, but to me he was just a stumbling shadow. "She made him forget his father. He'd have followed her into anything."
"Is she bad?" I asked him.
"Your mother? Bad? No," Foster said, then his eyes shut for a drunken second. "Bad is the world that makes such choices."
But I had been taught a stricter grammar. Wilma and the family taught it: a woman who lies to us must be a villain. Little East Uncle taught a muddling kindness between the lines.
Kiera Schroeder was supposed to teach me Mandarin. She was younger than dad's other guests and often smiled so gently I thought she might break into song. She called herself "Teacher Kiera."
"What's your full name?" she asked one lesson.
"What is a full name?" I asked.
She hesitated, then explained softly. "Something the world can call when it needs to find you, Janessa."
"I don't have one," I admitted. "They call me a dog name."
"That's silly," she said, and she gave me a candy. "Learn Mandarin, and I will give you another."
"Janessa," Augusto would say once in a while, only to himself. He would feel at me like a ledger; my cheek would be dusted by his careful attention and then left, cold. "Try to be useful."
I tried. I learned little poems and repeated them, because Kiera promised me candy. When I stood before the iron grille a second time, in a skirt and clutching a bunny toy Kiera had given me, I performed for the woman on the bed.
"Red beans grow in the southerly lands," I recited, and she flinched at the sound of the words like they were a bell.
"Stop," she whispered suddenly, and her voice was paper. She pressed her hand to my lips. "Stop," she told me, so stern and so tired that I had no choice but to obey.
"Why?" I asked my father on the stairs afterwards. "Why did you let me go if she turns away?"
"Because I am curious," he said simply. "You are like a small mirror. I like watching reflections."
One night the house screamed to life. Guns cracked like thunder and men fell like rain. I remember the elevator trembling, the smell of smoke, and then running. Little East Uncle pushed me until he fell—he died on the carpet with his blood making the rug blossom like a red flower.
"Kiera!" I heard someone shout. "She is with the narcotics unit, get her in!"
Kiera—my teacher—turned out to be a woman who could load a gun faster than she could laugh. She scooped me into an arm and pushed me toward the helicopter. "Get up," she said. "We must go. Now."
But things do not move like stories. In the sticky, burning chaos of that night, the world gave me images that burned and could not be erased: my father carrying me to the chopper, my mother led like a ghost beside him, and then the worst impossible thing.
"Don't leave me!" I screamed.
"Janessa!" my father choked. "Janessa—"
Light struck bright and wrong. There was a bang. My mother had a gun in her hand. She shot once toward him, then again. The rooftop became a frozen slide of hate and desperation and the two of them fell, arms locked, down into a darkness that went on forever.
I remember standing in the snow afterward with my bunny toy pressed to my chest. People were crying on the sidewalk and cameras flashed like beetles. The news said my father had no head; the news said he was dead; the news said the narcotics ring had been dismantled. My mother—the undercover—was shown on television in photos in uniform, eyes hard, jaw set.
"She died to save you?" Kiera asked me later, voice like a wet blanket.
"No," I said. "She looked like she wanted them both to fall."
They found their bones and told me what they wanted me to believe. They told me what "closure" sounded like in press rooms, where men and women took turns reading names, parading villains past camera lights. They told me my father had been a monster and deserved the fate newsreels gave him. They told me my mother had been a hero.
But the world around me wanted more than sorrow. The town wanted blood in the clean smell of justice. People who had suffered from the cartel wanted to watch the rulers trudge in shame. I had no power to stop the show.
"You're lucky to be alive," Kiera said again, taking my shoulders in hands that had killed and saved. "Soon, you'll have a real name."
"Will it be one she picked?" I asked her.
"I think so," she said, and she looked at a folded paper then, the kind of look that holds a world.
The days that followed were a parade of punishments. Men who had once smiled in my father's hall were forced into the light. The prosecutor held them up like broken toys. But the world asked for more than a curt arrest. It wanted spectacle. So they built it.
"People will come to see," announced a city official at the press gate. "They will see the cost of that life."
I did not want to go, but Kiera took me by the hand and led me to the square on a raw morning. The air tasted of iron and old fights. There were lines of police and cameras pointed like metal flowers. The crowd smelled like a held breath that was about to burst.
There were three men first: Ross Cleveland, Antonio Lehmann, and Dolan Stone—uncle figures, faces that had once been warm in photographs but were now streaked with fear. They were marched into the square like sacrificial figures. Each had a different punishment.
"Do not forget the faces of those who made families bleed," the prosecutor said, and his words echoed like hammers. "Do not forget their names."
"You're cruel," I heard a woman hiss from the crowd. "They're human."
A camera obligingly moved closer. "This is justice," Kaitlin—no, I must not invent new names—Kiera said to me, and she squeezed my hand like a frail anchor.
"Ross," the chief prosecutor began as Ross was made to kneel on the cold stone. "You used your charity to hide cruelty. Today, you will stand in the center while those who fled your violence speak."
"Stand," Ross gasped, voice transliterated into a whisper. "I'm not—" He began to protest.
"First punishment," the prosecutor announced. "Public testimony." People crowded forward to speak. A mother whose son had disappeared stepped up. Her voice quivered as she said, "You gave my boy bread and taught him obedience before you sold him for the price of a bottle. You called it family."
Ross's face jerked. The crowd burst with the sound of knives: gasps, cameras, the rustle of coats. Ross moved from proud to startled to denial—he tried to cry and failed.
"Second," the prosecutor said, voice even. "You will be posted on the bulletin boards across the city with every name you ever bought and sold. Men will spit. Children will draw your face. You will be unmasked. You will not have the comfort of anonymity."
"Please," Ross began, and he reached out with shaking hands to the man who had been his partner, Antonio. "Antonio, tell them—"
Antonio stared at him like a stranger. "You took my wife," he whispered. "You took much more." Suddenly Antonio's bravado slipped, and he crumbled into the same cycle Ross had fallen into: from king to beggar.
"Third," the prosecutor said. "You will be made to walk the route of shame—the pillory of truth. Each family you destroyed will be allowed to string a ledger around your neck—proof, receipts, children’s names—everything you used to justify monsters."
They dragged an old wooden frame into the square. Men who had once ordered murders now walked the path between two rows of people who spat the words they had waited years to say.
Ross went white, then red, then pale again. He faltered in the path, his legs shaking. He tried to turn his face up toward the heavens, but the crowd would not let him be a martyr. A woman whose son had been taken spat in his face and then read aloud a list of names Ross had once smiled at. Each name punctured his composure like a small, honest wind.
"Do you remember the little girl," the woman asked, "who used to pick flowers behind your house? Did you ever see her again?"
Ross could not answer. We all listened as he went through the cycle: first a terrified stare, then frantic pleading that he had been different, then a soft collapse into the shape of something broken. People took pictures. Men and women who had once been whispered about in the darkness now stood in applause. A few clapped with hands raw from years of labor. Children watched and recorded with their little digital boxes. Ross's arrogance flaked off like paint.
"Antonio," the prosecutor called next. "You will read aloud the ledger of all the payments you took for silence. Each name will be marked with a bell. Every bell will ring in public when you speak."
Antonio's face folded under the ledger's weight. He read names, and at each name a bell was rung by those who had been paid off, those who had been purchased into silence. When he finished, he sunk to his knees and sobbed—a long, drawn sound that spoke of a man crushed not by weight but by truth.
"Dolan," the prosecutor said last, and Dolan's punishment would be different. He had been the man who enforced the house's rules with a mixing of cruelty and a smile. "You will be stripped of all titles. You will publicly apologize, your words broadcast out of speakers across the city. They will not be allowed to be simple words; each apology will be specific. You will be required to name each crime, each victim. If you fail, you will be publicly humiliated again."
Dolan started to object. He tried to call his lawyers, to make deals. The cords tightened.
"Listen," a woman said from the back of the crowd—one of the mothers whose baby had been sold into a web of lies. "Those men ate our flesh and then said we owed them thanks. Today we only want them to say 'I did this.'"
They said it. It was small and terrible, the first words some of them had ever said that were true. It did what truth does best: it made other men smaller, and the people who listened larger. Cameras caught the change. Phones streamed, and strangers watched at home as men who had once been lawless became small. A few of them cried at the sound of public shame. Some collapsed and begged. A few brandished last words and were shoved back into silence.
"Don't forget the ones who made you small," a voice from the crowd said. "Don't let them leave with dignity."
They did not leave with dignity.
The punishments were different, tailored like medicine. Some were forced to confess; some were to man the clean-up crews in neighborhoods they had burned; some were forced to repair the walls they had broken. Each punishment had witnesses. The crowd shifted from hunger to satisfaction to that strange, settling calm that follows orders kept.
I watched them all and held Kiera's hand because I didn't know where else to put mine.
"Do you feel better?" Kiera asked because it was what the world expected.
"No," I said. "I feel small."
"You should feel safe," she pressed. "They can't touch you now."
But the square taught me that punishment could be a mirror for a wound, not a cure. Watching them humiliated didn’t build a mother back into the spaces she had left empty. Standing in a crowd and watching men wear their shame did not mend the hollowed place where my mother had been locked for ten years.
Afterward, the court processed them, the cameras moved on, and life declared a new normal. I was given papers by Kiera—papers with two names: one she had chosen, one our mother had whispered in a small folded gift she had left for me before she died.
"Kiera," I whispered one night, holding the folded paper to my nose as if smell could keep a person alive. "She gave me two names."
"Read them," Kiera said.
I unfolded the first slip. "Janessa Barron." That was what I had been called by other people. It fit the way I had been raised. I smiled weakly.
The second was in a tighter, sharper hand. "You are no longer a dog name," it said. "For you I give 'Janessa Lin'—no, she had written 'Zhu'—no." I read slowly. The note had been by hand: "For the little one—Lin An'an." The second name hurt like a secret.
"Which will you keep?" Kiera asked softly.
"Both," I said, and the world split into who I had been and who I would choose to be. "One for what they took, one for what they left."
They took my parents but left their contradictions. They left a city that would not forget their crimes, and they left me with names.
Years passed. I lived in children's homes and learned Mandarin proper, learned English properly, and the world slowly unglued itself into manageable pieces. Kiera visited me; she brought me strawberries and a piano lesson once I reached an age where the keys would not be heavy.
One day, much later, I discovered a file tucked into a box where my mother's things had been kept by the police. It was a long letter she had written to herself, or perhaps to me, or to the shape of her future that never came.
"Read this," Kiera said without looking up.
I read. Her voice—my mother's voice—rose like a ghost. It was not mine, and yet it filled the room in the way only someone who had held you close can fill it.
"I was twenty when I stole into their house," she wrote. "He smiled at me as though I were a prize. I was an undercover officer. I thought I could change him."
"I fell in love," her letter continued. "I remember the first time he opened his mouth and I thought of home; I remember a laugh like thunder and the way a small thing in his chest opened up. He was kind in small ways and cruel in big ones. I did not know how to reconcile those things."
She spoke of using her training to keep quiet, to take closeups of faces by the basin, to trace ledgers with light bulbs and small cameras. She wrote the names of lost friends in the margin.
"I had him," the letter said. "Then they found out. They beat me in a cellar for ten years. They told me to die and to do it neatly. I tried and they stopped me. I thought of other lives at night and how to be both the blade and the bandage."
"I saved the girl once and I did not know it," she wrote, and then she added something that made the page go hot in my hands. "I gave her something to keep. Her name."
She explained how she had taught me, in small ways, the sun lines, the way to pretend not to know. She told me of the night she chose to do something that changed everything: to shoot a man she loved.
"If they asked me to betray myself to make a story end, I would do it again," she wrote. "If it means Janessa gets a life that is not a cellar, then brick my tomb with my own hands."
I read until the pages blurred, until the lines of letters were rivers and the pen scratches were footprints. In the margins she had drawn little rabbits and the letters of my name. She had given me both a name and a promise, one that arrived in blood and fire.
"Kiera," I said later as we folded the papers back into the box. "She was both a traitor and a saint."
Kiera looked at me. "People are not simple, Janessa. They are stitched of many things. Her final choice was for you."
I kept all of it. The names. The letter. The taste of snow in my mouth.
Years later, I stood in a small town square where the names of the fallen were carved into stones. I laid a paper note with two names on it: the name my mother wanted and the name my father left me. People passed and read and kept walking. Life, like water, kept bending around the shapes of ruins.
At night when the city lights swallowed the stars, I would sometimes take the bus back to the place where the helicopter had taken off, stand where wind still remembered the fall, and whisper into the cold.
"I am Janessa," I say. "I am Lin An'an. I will not be a dog name."
Kiera comes sometimes and we sit in silence. "We did what we could," she says.
"Did you?" I ask.
"I did," she answers. "But there are things even we cannot fix. We only stitch the torn ones as best we can."
"Will the others be punished?" I ask, thinking of Ross and Antonio and Dolan.
"They were," Kiera says, and she lists their outcomes. "They were seen. They were named. They were made to carry their ledger of sins."
"Is that justice?" I whisper.
"It is an attempt," she says. "It is what the sun could do in a city of shadows."
The city gave me a name. The city gave Ross and the others their public humiliation. The city gave me my mother's letter and a future that was both jagged and possible.
When I was old enough to choose, I chose to be small and stubborn and alive. I chose to teach little girls that names could be cruel and kind both. I chose a life where sometimes punishment was public and necessary, where sometimes kindness had to be a sharp thing. I chose to remember that those who do evil should be seen, and those who do good should not be forgotten when they err.
Sometimes at night, in a house that has a piano and a window that looks over a safe street, I take my mother's folded note out and whisper into it like a prayer.
"Janessa Lin, Janessa Barron," I tell the paper. "I will be both of you, and I will not let your names be the end."
The End
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