You Don't Own Me (The Russian Don 1)

I guess even then she was already so different than me. ‘Does the grass feel pain when we walk on them?’ she asked my mother when she was three years old. My mother used to roll her eyes and call her Silly Billy every time she came up with one of her totally odd questions.

When she was six she announced that she was becoming a vegetarian. She was no longer going to eat anything with a face. That was until she found out about the experiment with the woman and the cabbage. It’s the one where plants are hooked up to machines that record their electrical emissions. A woman is then told to go into the room and violently butcher a cabbage.

The scientists notice the plant responds by showing distress, by increased and frantic electrical activity. They conclude that plants have the ability to understand violence and exhibit fear. A week later the same woman is told to walk into the room with a knife and though she does nothing this time, the plants mark her arrival with increased activity.

After my sister read that she became a fruitarian. Sometimes she will sit for hours outside not reading or listening to music, or talking to someone on the phone, but in her lingo just ‘being’. To think of such a gentle creature being abducted and harmed makes my blood boil, and I jump up suddenly waking the woman beside who mutters with irritation and goes right back to sleep.

I walk up and down the aisle restlessly until I have calmed myself by thinking that maybe they have already found her. Maybe by the time I get off the plane my mom will have good news for me.

My mother comes to pick me up from the airport. One look at her face and I know that she has nothing new to tell me. She looks pale and frightened. I hug her tightly.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Dahlia,’ she whispers into my hair. Her voice trembles with anguish.

‘They’ll find her, Mom. I know they will.’

‘Do you really think so?’ she asks earnestly.

‘Of course they will,’ I say firmly.

She nods eagerly.

We hang on to each other like the survivors of a war and walk to the truck. Suzie, our pit bull is in the back. She jumps out and goes crazy, launching herself at me as she whimpers and yelps with joy.

‘She knows something has happened to Daisy. She’s been acting strange for the last three days,’ my mom says.

‘Of course she hasn’t, Mom. She’s just picking up your fear,’ I say while Suzie licks the hell out of my face.

I take the keys from my mother and get into the driver’s seat. We don’t speak in the car. I can see Suzie in the side mirrors holding her gorgeous diamond shaped head against the wind. Her top lip is pushed right back and all her sharp teeth are exposed. I feel a tug of sadness at the sight. It feels very strange to be back home with my mom and Suzie and no Daisy.

Just as I pull into our driveway a text message comes through for me. I park the car and look at it. I have to look again. I lift my head and look at my mother.

‘Oh, Mom,’ I cry.

‘What is it?’ my mother asks in a panicked voice. ‘What is it?’

I can’t talk. I just start sobbing uncontrollably. All that emotion and fear I had stored ever since I heard that Daisy might be missing gushed out of me.

I hold the phone out to her. She snatches it from me and looks at the screen.

It is just two words.

Found her.

My mom looks at me, her eyes wide and shining with crazy hope. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

I nod, tears streaming down my eyes.

Suzie is whimpering and scratching pitifully at the grill because she thinks something horrible has happened to us. I get out of the car, let her out and hold her tight.

‘Daisy’s coming back, Suzie,’ I say again and again, sobbing hard into her silky fur.

It seems like an eternity passes before Daisy is back home. The reunion is odd. My mother and I cry buckets of tears and young Daisy comforts us as if we are the ones who have been through an abduction ordeal. Later we sit on the porch just staring at her. She gazes back serenely, one hand absently stroking Suzie’s head.

‘So you never saw the men who took you?’

‘Never. Like I said we were walking back from the restaurant to the little hotel when a dusty white van pulled up, two men got out, grabbed us, and bundled us into the van. There were four of them, but they wore Disney character masks. They immediately blindfolded, gagged and tied us up.’

‘Didn’t you and Marie struggle?’