9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Eliza
It was Mara who said it, a week in, in the plain way she said everything.
"You can take the wrappings off, you know. Down here."
We were in the storeroom. I’d been at it for days by then—pulling everything off the shelves, learning what they had down to the last jar.
I built the place back up in an order that made sense to a person who wasn’t Beckett.
I labeled crates in charcoal so anyone could find the lamp oil or the dried beans without going to ask him.
Honest work. The kind that filled your hands and quieted your head.
Mara took to keeping me company in the afternoons, sitting on an overturned bucket, mending or shelling or just talking, never pushing, letting the quiet do most of it.
I stopped with a jar of last summer's beans in my hand. "I don't know what you mean."
"You do." She didn't look up from her mending.
That was a kindness, the not-looking; I was learning that the women here had a whole language of it.
"I spent thirty years a midwife before all this.
I know how a body moves when it's bound up under there, and I know how it moves when it's free, and yours moves like it's been strapped down so long it's forgotten there's another way.
Your ribs, sweetheart. The way you breathe shallow off the top of your lungs.
You can't draw a full breath and you've stopped noticing you can't."
I set the jar down. My hands weren't quite steady.
"It keeps me safe," I said. The thing I said to myself ten thousand times. The thing that was true.
"It kept you safe out there." She did look up then, just for a second, and her eyes were the gentlest thing I'd seen in years and they saw straight through me.
"You're not out there. There's forty feet of mountain and a steel door between you and out there.
There's not a soul down here that hasn't bled to get behind that door, and not one of them is going to look at you sideways for being what you are.
But you do what you need to do. I just wanted you to know the wrappings were a choice down here, and not the only one. "
She went back to her mending. The subject was closed, the way she closed subjects, by simply setting them down where you could pick them up again or not.
I picked the jar back up. I shelved it. I didn't say anything else.
But that night I lay in the dark behind my locked door, in the warm that didn't quit, and I put my hand flat on my own bound chest and tried to take a full breath, and I couldn't. She was right.
I forgot. Somewhere in five years of making myself small and flat and nobody, I forgot what a whole breath even felt like, and now that I knew I couldn't take one, I couldn't think about anything else.
It took me three more days to do it.
I waited until the small hours, when even The Hollow slept, when there was no one in the corridors and no chance of a knock. I lit the lamp low. I locked the door and checked it twice. And then I stood in the middle of that small dry room and I started to unwind.
I wore some versions of the bindings so long that taking them off felt like surgery.
Strips of cloth I cut and recut and rewashed in creeks across half a state, gone yellow and thin, wound and tucked in a pattern my hands knew in the dark.
They came away in a long slow spiral, and with every turn the air reached a little more of me, and by the time the last of it dropped to the floor I was shaking, and I still hadn't taken the breath.
I made myself take it.
It went in deep—all the way down, the bottom of my lungs filling for the first time in, I couldn’t remember how long.
The ribs spread wide, the whole cage of me opening.
It hurt, a real ache, muscle and bone remembering a shape they’d been denied.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the ache turned over and became something else.
I sat down hard on the edge of the bed because my legs wouldn’t hold me.
I cried then. Finally. The way I haven’t let myself in the station, in the draw, in years of nowhere being safe enough to fall apart in.
I cried with both hands pressed over my mouth so no one would hear.
My whole body shook with it, because it turned out grief and relief lived in the same place and you couldn't open the door for one without the other coming through. I cried for the woman I folded up and put away to survive. I cried for every breath I didn’t take.
I cried because a sixty-year-old midwife looked at me across a storeroom and saw me whole, the whole buried shape of me, and handed it back like it was nothing, like it was mine to have.
It was mine to have. That was the thing I couldn't get past. It had been mine the whole time.
When it was done I felt scoured out and light, the way you do after. I lay back on the bed and breathed. Just breathed, in and out, all the way down. Like it was the most extraordinary thing a body could do. Maybe it was. Maybe I just forgot that too.
I didn't put the wrappings back on.
In the morning I folded them and set them in the bottom of my pack, because I wasn't fool enough to throw them away—the world was still the world, and someday I might need to be nobody again.
But I didn't put them on. I put on the flannel, loose over nothing now, and I walked out into the corridor able to breathe.
If anyone noticed the shape of me was different, they had the grace Mara had taught them all, and nobody said a word.
It was Mara, again, who brought up the hair.
"I could clean that up for you," she said, a few days later.
We were in the warm little washroom off the kitchen, the one with the water they pumped up from somewhere and heated on the stove, the unimaginable luxury of warm water that I still couldn't quite believe was real.
She'd been showing me the system, how the greywater worked, the careful economy of it.
"If you wanted. I cut everybody's down here.
I'm no barber, but I'm better than a hunting knife and a guess, which is what you've been using, no offense to you. "
My hand went up to it on its own. The hair I hacked off in creek beds and gas station mirrors for five years, growing out now raggedy and uneven, a thing I never once thought of as hair, only as a problem I managed. "It doesn't matter what it looks like."
"No," Mara agreed. "It doesn't matter even a little.
That's exactly why you should let me do it.
" She smiled, and the seams of her face all turned upward.
"Out there, everything you did to yourself you did because it mattered, because it kept you alive.
Wouldn't it be something to do one thing just because it's nice?
Just because warm water and somebody's hands and an hour of sitting still feels good, and you're allowed to have things that feel good now. "
I didn't have an answer for that. I was getting used to not having answers for the things these people said to me. They kept saying things that cracked me open along seams I didn't know I had.
"Sit," Mara said, and patted the stool, and I sat.
She washed it first. That alone—her hands working warm water through my hair, the smell of some soap she made herself with flowers in it, her fingers careful and unhurried against my scalp—undid something in me so completely I had to shut my eyes.
I couldn't remember the last time another person touched me with no want in it.
Not grabbing, not fighting, not the brace-for-impact of every human contact on the road.
Just hands. Just kindness, with nothing underneath it but more kindness.
"There's a girl in here somewhere," Mara murmured, working a tangle loose with a patience that didn't tug.
"Knew it the second you walked in. Some folks come in off that mountain and they've gone hard all the way through, nothing left but the survival.
Not you. You went hard on the outside and kept the soft part hidden way down where the world couldn't get it.
That's a harder way to do it. Costs more.
" She rinsed, water sluicing warm down the back of my neck.
"But it means there's still somebody in there to come back.
Not everybody's got that. You hang onto it. "
"How do you know I'm not hard all the way through?"
"Because you went small for my grandbabies.
" Her hands stilled for a second. "First night.
Half-dead and wild-eyed and armed to the teeth, and Nessa plops down across from you, and you…
I watched you do it… you made yourself gentle.
You softened your whole self down so you wouldn't frighten a child.
A person who's gone hard all the way through can't do that anymore.
Doesn't even think of it." She started combing.
"You thought of it first thing. That's how I know. "
I shut my eyes again, because they started to burn.
She cut it with real scissors, slow, taking her time, and we didn't talk much.
The snip of the blades. Warm water. The lamp burning gold.
The far-off sounds of The Hollow waking up beyond the door, the ordinary morning music of a place full of people who were safe, a child's voice, a pot, somebody laughing at something.
Wet hair falling away. An hour of sitting still and being tended, just because it was nice, just because I was allowed to have things that were nice now.
When she was done she held up a square of polished steel they used for a mirror, and I looked at myself for the first time in I didn't know how long.
I almost didn't know her.
The hair was still short. She kept it short, because she understood without asking, that I wasn't ready for more, that short was still where safe lived in my body.
But it was cut now, shaped close and even, deliberate instead of desperate.
It looked like a choice. And under it was a face I hadn't seen in years, because I stopped looking, because the flat hard nobody-face had been all I let myself wear.
Thinner than I remembered. Older. Weathered down to something I didn't recognize at first.
But it was a woman's face. It was my face. Eliza's face, the one I said to myself in the dark to keep, and there she was in a square of steel in a warm room under a mountain, looking back at me with eyes that were wet and a mouth that didn't know what to do with itself.
"There she is," Mara said softly, echoing my own thought so exactly I startled. She set the mirror down and put one warm weathered hand against my cheek, brief, the way you touch something you were glad to see. "Welcome back, sweetheart."
I put my hand over hers. I didn't decide to.
It just happened, my hand finding hers and holding it against my own face for a second.
That was the most I touched another person on purpose in five years, and it didn't feel like danger.
It felt like the opposite of danger. It felt like coming up for air.
"Thank you," I said. My voice cracked clean down the middle. "I don't…Thank you."
"Oh, now." Mara's own eyes had gone bright. She squeezed my cheek and let go and busied herself sweeping up the hair, giving me the privacy to gather myself, the way they all did. "It's only a haircut."
It wasn't only a haircut. We both knew it wasn't only a haircut.
I walked out of that washroom able to breathe, with my own face on, and I went and found work to do because I didn't have words yet for what happened to me and work was where I put the things I had no words for.
But somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, hauling crates, I caught Beckett looking at me from across the common room.
He didn't say anything. He promised me he wouldn't make things a thing, and he didn't. But I watched it land on him—that the shape of me was different, that the hair was cut, that the woman crossing his common room with her arms full was standing taller and breathing deeper and wearing her own face for the first time since he met her.
Something moved across his features, quick, before he got it under control.
Not the look I spent my life dreading off men.
Something quieter and steadier and a great deal more dangerous to me, because I had no armor built for it at all.
Then he nodded, once, like he was greeting someone, and went back to his work and let me be.
I went back to mine. But my heart was doing the stupid thing again, the thing it started doing in the snow over a row of cans, and this time I didn't have the wrappings or the nobody-face or two ridges of frozen mountain between us to blame it on.
This time it was just me. Just Eliza. Breathing all the way down, in a warm gold room, feeling something I buried so deep start, very slowly, to wake up.