Don’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to be living here in the McKillop mansion.

But when Mrs. Mildred McKillop invited me, an undocumented refugee, to stay in her home, what was I supposed to do?

She caught me when I was at a low point, a few years ago, going door to door offering to rake and sweep leaves in the fall. “Ten bucks a pop,” I would say to whoever opened the door of each fine, gracious home in the ritziest enclave of Denver. They’d take one look at me, a sixteen-year-old kid with a bad haircut, wearing an outdated Denver Dynamite jersey, and they’d think, why not support a neighborhood kid?

This is how I was living in America, once my “uncle” smuggled me here to Denver, to work in his landscaping business. I had mowed lawns that summer; I would shovel snow in the winter, but that fall I was raking leaves and staying in his tent. Whatever it took to survive. I was lousy at all three chores, because heck, I was only sixteen going on sixty—not particularly strong or tenacious. Uncle was a drinker and sometimes he left for days at a time, but I kept making the rounds.

Grizzled old Bob, who was Mildred’s handyman, figured me out right away as I stood there, holding a rake, shivering on the doorstep. “I’m a foreigner in this place, too, boy,” he said in a low voice, speaking a dialect familiar in Yugoslavia.

“Promise you won’t tell,” I begged. My eyes filled with tears; he was one of us. It was such a relief to hear the mother tongue, like a drink of fresh water after sipping the murky stuff of English.

“Newcomers must not make waves,” he said gruffly, his index finger jabbing my chest. “That’s how you escape war—take the path of least resistance.” We were hatched from the same nest, the bloody war that tore Yugoslavia apart. Or, Bosnia Herzegovina, as they call it now.

I raked the McKillop lawn, took my money, and moved on to the next job. I waited for “uncle” to return, maybe bringing news of my parents.

Two weeks later, while moving my tools from one job to another, I got hit by a pickup truck. Mrs. McKillop, passing by in her car, stopped to pick me up (and my rakes, brooms, and bike). She brought me first to the hospital and second to recuperate at her mansion. Her guest room was so beautiful, decorated with silver-blue brocade wallcovering. Its intricate pattern fascinated me for hours as I lay healing.

She explained that Mr. McKillop was a mining engineer, working somewhere in Africa, and she wanted company. “I used to teach ESL,” she said. “Please call me Mildred.”

Apparently, no neighbor wondered twice why this middle-aged woman had a new teenager living at her house. It was right after the worst of Covid; there are so many big houses in this area, some with kids, most without. People don’t stick their noses in their neighbor’s business. Not like my home village, where everyone knew everybody else. Here, it is different.

“I owe Mildred my life,” I told Bob after I settled in.

He made a strange face. “You would have survived… it’s just a bad spill.” He warned me about Mildred. “She is crazy, not-crazy—she is someone who can pass as a fine upstanding citizen and philanthropist. But watch out.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding, resolving to look up the word fill-an-throw-pissed. (I was—and still am—a sponge for new words and phrases.) I wanted to keep the peace. Crazy-not-crazy. But what did Bob know? Although he came from my homeland, I had a strong suspicion he fought on the side opposite to my family’s. I didn’t dare ask. The name “Bob” was obviously an assumed name. Maybe for ease of pronunciation. Maybe to conceal his past.

Mildred took pity on me. I became her new project—I see that now. But then, all I could see was a big warm house, a kind-hearted lady, and winter creeping closer each day.

She quickly discovered my superpower was not yardwork, but wordsmithing. I love to write stories. I am what some people call a graphomaniac—a word I encountered in old texts. I write and write, an obsession that started with the hostilities in my home country, or even maybe before then, because Mama and Papa were always squabbling. Crafting stories was an spectacular way to escape. The refugee camps where I and my parents fled—there was always pen and paper to be found, even if the paper was filched from the UN “How To” binders of operations and protocols.

I had stayed a few days in her guest room when Mildred found out I was writing stories featuring her. She preened for a day or two, proud to excite a writer’s attention, until she read a new story where I killed her off. It was just an imaginative exercise, but she freaked out, grabbed me by the elbow, and locked me away in her “dungeon.”

I laughed. Her “dungeon” was only a basement. It was snug—and I kept dreaming up adventure stories. Because why not. But my notebooks and pens stayed upstairs.

Every mealtime, the cook slid in food and drink through a special cabinet. “Miss Mildred is giving you time out,” Janie whispered. She was a wide, maternal lady with a wide, upside-down smile. “I seen ever’thing with these rich folk.”

After a week of solitary confinement, I felt helpless and alone. What good was I without a writing utensil? Shoveling snow looked good by comparison. I needed to escape Mildred’s dungeon—but I needed above all to write.

Inspiration struck. I noticed old calendars hanging on the basement walls. I found a carpenter’s pencil stub and sharpened it by rubbing against concrete. I started writing different stories featuring Mildred, where she was a child and was rescued time after time.

Strange to say, but this new cycle of stories gave me empathy for my captor. Stockholm syndrome, they call it. I neatly rewrote the best story and sent it up via the cook’s special cabinet.

Mildred read it and liked it. No, loved it. She told Janie that I “could see into her soul.” Janie was laughing when she came down to unlock the dungeon.

Mildred gifted me her old laptop with two conditions. I could only connect to a limited part of the internet. And I had to write for a publisher, Pickwick Publications, that ran the annual challenge called the Dickens Factory. This was back in the 1990s, well before the phenomenon known as NaNoWriMo took off like a rocket. But it was based on the same concept, namely, to write a certain number of quality words a day for a whole month to create a novel. The Dickens Factory was patterned on Charles Dickens’s production schedule, which averaged two thousand words a day throughout his lifetime.

 I outlined a coming-of-age novel featuring Mildred. I could not wait to start; Dickens is my hero, a fellow graphomaniac. The novel, Escape from the Battlefield, was actually about Sara, a girl I remembered from childhood, but I gave her many characteristics of Mildred because this pleased my benefactress. The real Sara had to survive terrible conditions, including sleeping in a pigsty. Last I heard, Sara had transferred out of the refugee camp and was living in New York City.

I wrote and revised; Mildred monitored. She drugged me with bennies to write fast and with barbies to sleep better at night. (This I did not find out until much later, when Janie filled me in one day when I couldn’t understand why I was both jittery and sleepy at the same time.) Mildred and I existed in a peculiar folie à deux. She did not imprison me physically; I was like those monkeys who become so accustomed to captivity they won’t leave an open cage. I could come and go as I liked, but I was so fixated on making the daily word count that I never ventured far afield. Also, if “uncle” returned, I feared he would notice me and beat me.

The beginning chapters were uneven. Eventually, though, I hit my stride. I could “channel” Sara. The more I wrote, the more I remembered about her. Her scraggly braids, her occasional black eye, her indomitable spirit. And the more questions I discovered I had about her. What was it like, being a wartime girl and having boys find you attractive for a body you find perplexing? What was it like, that first time you “became a woman”—how did you even define it? The menarche? Or your first time with a boy? All these things were too personal for Mildred. I was curious to hear Sara’s input. I fantasized about looking her up in New York City.

One day, Mildred did not come to pick up my pages. Dinner arrived late, and I was grew hungry and anxious. The next day she was again overcome by lethargy, and the day after she angrily dismissed the cook. I was given no breakfast. No lunch.

I ate up all my hidden stockpile. (You know, those extra packets of ketchup and crackers and sugar that come with takeout.) Over the next several days, Mildred’s depression deepened, and she took to her bed.

I had to break into the pantry to get dry cereal to eat.

Bob finished putting up the Christmas lights at Mildred’s house and they sparkled so prettily amid the snow. I put the finishing touches on my first real novel through the Dickens Factory and sent it to the Pickwick editors.

And the next thing we knew, Mildred, in her nightdress, was on the rooftop, beside the illuminated Santa, belting out, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”

Bob called the ambulance for Mildred, and she was committed to the psychiatric ward at the Denver hospital. We gave them the contact information for Mr. McKillop in the DRC.

 While Mildred was away, Bob ruled the roost. He watched soccer on the biggest TV, and I kept a low profile. While waiting to hear from Pickwick, I started my next novel, Escape from Manhattan. It would feature another Mildred/Sara mash-up.

Meanwhile, I quietly explored the mansion.

In Mildred’s bedroom closet I found two overnight cases tagged with unknown names, Noah Sturgeon and Wesley Kwinter, and a scrapbook documenting their sudden deaths in the Colorado Rockies. Noah fell from a cliff; two years later, Wesley drowned in a creek. What reckless teenagers, to put themselves in such dangerous positions! Evidently, the tenderhearted Mrs. McKillop still mourned them. I saw how her earlier behavior—forcibly confining me, encouraging sedentary pursuits—was meant to protect.

Don’t tell anyone, but I felt overwhelmed with uncertainty. Like Mildred, I, too, felt energy seeping from me. I knew I should visit Mrs. McKillop in the psych ward and thank her from the bottom of my heart for taking me in.

I worried about my first novel—still no word from Pickwick. And the second novel was turning into a shambles. I found myself unable to write. But if I couldn’t meet wordcount, how could I continue living in paradise? Should I continue living at all?

I battled for my own sanity, losing my will to live.

Mildred was discharged from the psych ward and just showed up one day, bursting in through the back door and scaring the bejesus out of me. When she discovered that I had free run of the place, she said, “I’m going to kill Bob.”

I laughed; hyperbole is common in everyday American expression. Mildred killing someone? How preposterous!

I left her in the kitchen, contemplating knives in the butcher block. I shuffled to my bedroom, squeezed out a sentence, then fell asleep.

I dreamed she was coming at me with the biggest knife.

I leapt out of bed, blundered around the darkened room, pawing for clothes and knapsack.

And my laptop, so I could finish that second novel! How I wanted to capture this feeling of terror and flight! This spine-tingling moment would find its way into Escape from Manhattan.

Just as I dashed across the driveway, a shiny red Porsche roared out of the garage and drove over my foot.

 After the initial scream, I tried to control myself, so I bit down on a pencil. I tried to be a man. My foot was excruciating but I couldn’t have the neighbors moaning about me—and getting the authorities breathing down my undocumented neck.

Not to mention, the poor publicity for my friend and protectoress, Mrs. McKillop. She wept copiously and begged my forgiveness.

“Take me… for an X-ray,” I implored between gritted teeth.

She went inside to call for an ambulance and quickly returned. “Tarik, the hospital’s too busy—they’re dealing with a bus accident. They said we can come in first thing tomorrow.” Only later did I find out this was a complete fabrication.

Bob arrived with a bottle of meds and soon I was floating on the strong sedative. He carried me upstairs, bumping my foot on the newel post—and I didn’t even feel it.

I was lying in the brocade room when I heard someone ring the doorbell and speak to Mildred. (Through the heating vents I could hear everything, but I could not discern if the speaker was a man or woman.) They identified themself as “a rescue worker for migrants.” They asked Mildred if she had seen me, Tarik.

I’ve never been so happy! A rescue worker! Coming to save me!

I shouted, “Here I am!” I stomped on the floor. I dragged myself to the door, opened it and shouted down the stairwell, “I am here; I am Tarik!”

No response.

Instead, I overheard Mildred’s cheery voice. “Let me show you his room. It’s in the basement. You know teen boys, how they love basements.”

Her voice faded as she continued giving the tour. Five minutes later the power surged, like the house was almost going into blackout.

A terrible suspicion dawned.

I blacked out and Mildred found me at the entry to the guest room. My foot was hurting so terribly, I begged her to kill me, too. She pushed me down with her knee, injected something, and locked the door from the outside.

 From the window upstairs I could see her supervising Bob as he put something into the trunk of her car. She drove off.

 I don’t know when she came back. Doped up on painkillers, I lost consciousness. When I awoke, it could have been any time of day. Bob was carrying me down to the cellar. Not the joke “dungeon,” but the cold, damp unfinished part, containing old paint cans and office furniture.

 I spotted a paper shredder among the junk in the cellar. That gave me an idea and a renewed reason to live.

When Mildred returned, I limped forward. “I appreciate your keeping my illegal status a secret,” I said. “Every minute of my suffering will go into a cataclysmic ending for my new novel, Mildred’s Dilemma. But I need your help to finish writing this page-turner for the Dickens Factory.”

I asked her to print it out. We hunkered down with the whole manuscript, two extra-large pizzas, and two dozen energy drinks. And a fresh bottle of pills. In a frenzy of activity, we marked up the whole manuscript by hand, from prolog to epilog. We marked up some major revisions.

Fifty hours later she dozed on a cot.

The painkiller was wearing off, and it felt like a hot poker was replacing the marrow of my lower leg bone. I had reached my breaking point.

I plugged in the paper shredder, and I roughly shook her awake. I said, “Here. This is what I think of the novel,” and I began feeding it ten pages at a time.

Mildred screamed and tried to stop me, but I’d had enough of her interference.

I slapped her away. Then I whacked her with my keyboard. Damn, that felt good.

 The pain from my foot felt like fire all over my body and I could not stop whacking her. She stumbled out to the garage, where the power tools were kept. I barricaded the door and waited, tears running down my face. Eventually, exhausted, I dozed fitfully.

I woke up in a cold sweat. I’d hallucinated Mildred coming at me with a power drill.

But no, what I had heard was the cop car roaring into the driveway, on the trail of the missing rescue worker. They found the worker’s body in the kitchen, electrocuted. They found Mildred’s body in the garage, slumped over in her car with the engine still running.

 Months later, my book was published: Escape from the Madhouse. Not a novel—a memoir of what I had endured.

The End