at Reed to gauge his reaction to that bit of awfulness, but to his credit, he kept his expression neutral. “I was grieving, but I felt mostly safe. I wasn’t constantly afraid . . .” After a brief pause, she said, “A little while after I’d been released from the hospital, I was sent to this camp as part of a state funded program while my foster care placement was being finalized. It was meant as a reprieve. Camp Joy,” she said shooting him a smile.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “I know Camp Joy. The CPD uses it for team building during the academy.” His face screwed up. “The name though . . . it was probably the last thing you were feeling.”
“True,” she breathed. “But, in a roundabout way, it ended up inspiring just that. The other kids and I zip-lined and played games. We got to be kids. And one of the things they did at Camp Joy was an interactive play about the Underground Railroad. The staff members were the conductors and the campers were the runaway slaves. They took us about a mile through the woods where we met an abolitionist, and a plantation owner . . . a bounty hunter.”
“And this was helpful for kids who’d just experienced trauma?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Liza let out a short laugh. “I know it sounds questionable, but they made us feel very safe. They made us feel like a team. And it was . . . inspiring. In a way it was scary, to learn what these people had experienced on their journey to freedom. To know the lengths they had gone through, the suffering, but also learn of those who willingly assisted them along the way . . . this covert network of good people who wanted to help and put their very lives—their own freedom—on the line. We learned that Cincinnati played a significant role in the Underground Railroad as thousands of slaves crossed the Ohio River from southern states. There are still rooms and passageways that were once safehouses and hiding places. There’s a now-abandoned house near the river where freedom seekers hid in this below-ground storage area that had a water runoff tunnel leading from it that let out on the shore.” She paused for just a moment. “I imagined those scared people gathered there, crawling into that darkness, and then running through the woods in the pitch-black of night, the only light cast by a sliver of moon. The bravery that would have taken, the terror that must have been in their hearts, but they did it anyway, running toward a world that would not embrace them because they decided that freedom was bigger and far more powerful than their fear. Their stories—though vastly different—made me want to be brave too.” Liza took a deep breath, realizing that she’d gotten lost in her own story, the deep interest she’d once had on the topic of those who escaped brutality to find freedom. But when she glanced at Reed, he looked so interested in what she was saying, that the embarrassment that had begun to rise within her, receded.
“Anyway,” she went on, “it had affected me so much, that when I was placed in my first home, I went to the library and checked out every book I could. I’d learned about slavery in school, of course, but not in a way that made it real to me. Camp Joy did that. And what it showed me was that people had made it through things even worse than what I’d experienced. They’d survived, some had even thrived, and maybe, therefore, I could too.” She glanced at him. “I became deeply interested in history, in wars, even genocides. I checked out books. I immersed myself in it.” She let out a small laugh that turned into a grimace. “I know it sounds morbid.”
“No,” Reed said. “It sounds like hope. You were looking for hope. You weren’t interested in the suffering so much as you were interested in the survival that followed.”
She gazed at him. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, I guess it was.” Hope. That had been what she’d been so desperate to find. He’d listened to her whole story, and pulled that one word from it. And that was it, that was exactly it. She’d been searching for hope, and she’d first found it there.
She’d never put her thoughts into words the way she just had. Never explained to anyone how she’d first begun lifting