Promises of Paisley

Prologue Sabine

Feeling like yesterday but aging into many months ago, I was in the midst of just finding myself anew, at a pinnacle point of change and self discovery, when a landslide of realities claiming my existence swept me up in mere seconds. I felt the dark clouds misting overhead before I could even give my final bow.

Before I lost myself that night, I was just kissed by the man in my dreams while moving up from the substitute position to the dancing star for a nationally televised fashion show. Gliding around and shaking my butt in front of a huge audience of eyeballs, my dream man, and cameras blaring red digital lights for the live show, my happy ever after was coming together, until trained but innocent friendly eyes spotted my identifiable mark during last call dress change. Turns out, Sabine is a made-up person who was never supposed to be the normally geeky, boring girl living inside closed walls within Paisley, New York.

My father always told me the dark spot behind my head, on my neck just above my hairline, was an irregular shaped lucky freckle I've had since childbirth.

I knew my so-called father immigrated from Colombia with his family when he was a child, where he was then raised in South Florida. He met and married an American woman when he was eighteen, giving him the citizenship he needed to legally be living and working in the United States of America. The same woman who I grew up knowing as my mother, giving me her last name and pretending I was hers to only just leave us a few short years later. Yet, what my father didn't tell me until I confronted him the night of my rise and fall, is that my freckle is actually a tattoo of a bird that the Cartel branded on me in Colombia where I was born. Oh, and my Papa is not my biological father. I am theirs, not his.

      "My dear Sabine you were always mine to love and take care of, a gift from the heavens," he cried as my shell stood in front of him to face the facts. With black makeup smeared across my face, holding a scrambled mess of packed luggage, I felt more numb than I ever thought possible as answers where admitted.

 In our moment of desperation, my father started to unfurl the past in quick sentences to paint the picture of my arrival. 

Still married to Michelle, they were financially struggling on Papa's day laboring job as a welder, when he was approached outside his work by a group of powerful men. The boss in front, a French man in a crisp suit seeking my father's welding skills on an industrial ship in port headed to South America, that transported materials for heavy equipment. My father knew at that point that both his Colombian roots and having a legal U.S. passport had a role in this job assignment, but with the voice of authority and a wad of cash in the French man's hand that could change one's life, whether or not it was a choice, my father's decision remained simple in the moment. While overseas, by the time the ship ported to refuel in Colombia, he had learned to blindly look in the opposite direction while the ship got loaded down with cargo containers filled with ammunition, immigrants, and groups of masked men with scarfs covering them from nose down, who were holding onto both. Quick stops along the way in the middle of the sea next to small boats, for cash transfers from hands of Pirates to hands of Coyotes before seizing girls and boys of all ages. Stolen and sold like it was just passing through a traffic light. While telling me gruesome details, Papa still would not give out any names to me for my own safety, but explained in his sobs of shame that his position of work on that ship was no better than the menacing group of Cartel coyotes who took over, because they were also under the Frenchman's payroll, along with the crooked, American Border Patrol officers paid to look the other way during inspections.

Smart enough to know he would be a dead man if he spoke up about it, but not deaf enough to ignore the crying underneath him that rang out in despair during the long nights at sea en route back to Florida.

His story got deeper, "All I knew was that every body on that ship had a purpose. If you were standing in storage underneath in Cargo, your future had already been decided by the dark shameful group of men in arms also down there, who owned you. And if you were a body like me working above deck, work and leave quietly if you wanted to live."

My father literally shuttered before continuing, "But that last night, Sabine." He closed his eyes and shook his head, "That last night, the cries I was hearing got louder, and they weren't all from grown men and women, but mostly from young children screaming in terror! I couldn't sleep and I became restless, so I followed around the edge pretending to look sea sick delirious until I could stand still and listen to voices amongst the screams. The deep sea waves of the dark inked waters churned in between cries as the awareness of child trafficking hit me hard, and deflated my thick skull to not be able to think straight. My wife and I had been trying to have children for years but we never had the luck, so it stung harder to know the fire those poor kids were all about to be tossed into once we landed on American soil. If they survived the trip, those kids would be facing challenges nobody should have to endure and then somehow become the forgotten in freedom's land. This Colombian group used everybody for profits within their colliding dark worlds of drugs, sex, money, and power. That night, there I was listening to this argument below me, between two armed men about losing a child to sea, and suddenly I had small cold hands tugging on the bottom of my shirt. Fairer skinned than most full-blooded Colombians on board, I thought you were just pale from fright. Your sad and scared blue eyes looked into me and it was like our lives flashing between us, Sabine, and I knew you were mine to protect. You couldn't have been older than three, holding in your sobs like a smart girl, bloody fingerprints all over you and the raggedy clothes you had on. I'm not sure how you got upstairs without being seen, but as I stood still staring you down and you gripped me tight, I listened to the argument below deck decide our fates. The two men came to the quick decision not to speak about you missing to anyone else, not just because they would likely have been killed for it, but there were apparently two of you. They spoke about a sibling that would suffice as payment for the family's debt. After I heard this, one man pushed the other to sea and I hid you close to me throughout that night and then in my own form of luggage while departing the ship. We somehow both made it out alive and I moved us north so we could be safe. Michelle helped us for years until she couldn't handle the lies, so she left us both."

Mommy issues and a father who tried his hardest at giving me the world, my whole life has been made up in a web of lies.

And now the twisted mindfuck of a shell I am left with, isn't the same Sabine Woodberry who was trying to smile up on that stage months ago during her first, and likely last, standing ovation. The damage is a heavy pile blocking any light I once felt, crushing my heart, and now the search and rescue has begun.

I was definitely never meant to be in small towns that snow, and now I have banished that girl far south to find out the truth. My truth.