Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Mila
The knock comes, and I'm already at the window with the cooler between me and the door.
I don't remember getting up.
My heart's going like a bird against a windshield.
"It's me," a woman says. "It's Lashes. I've got coffee, and I'm not coming in."
I don't say anything.
"I'm going to set it down out here and go stand over by the fire pit." Her voice stays on the other side of the glass. "You can come get it whenever."
Something scrapes on the slab.
Then boots on gravel, going away.
I stand there for a long time.
Through the window, she's got her back to me at the fire pit with her arms crossed and her chin down in her collar, no baby on her, looking out at the desert like it owes her money.
I open the door.
The coffee's on the ground in a mug with a rooster on it. Somebody's joke, or nobody's, and I look at it for four seconds before I pick it up.
It's hot enough to hurt.
I hold it in both hands and let it.
I didn't sleep.
I sat on that couch for ten hours with my arms around my own ribs, and I couldn’t sleep for one minute of it.
Every time I closed my eyes, I was standing four inches from his mouth with my hand in his chain.
I've had a hand on my throat.
I've had hands on every part of me, and I’ve gone somewhere else for all of it, every time, nine years of leaving my own body at the door like a coat, and last night a man put his hand near me, and I nearly came apart in a sunroom because I could smell him.
That's the part I can't get past.
Not that I almost did it. That I wanted to.
For years, the only thing I had was that nobody got one piece of me I didn't hand over, and I was going to hand it to him. Over a smell.
I'd have given it away standing up in a cold room with a glass of whiskey in me, to the man who left me when I needed him.
The man who is wholeheartedly responsible for why I am alone. Why my parents are dead.
So no, I didn't sleep.
"They come out here in the summer, and they think the whole state's an oven." Lashes doesn't turn around. "Then it's January and it's twenty-six degrees at four in the morning and everybody acts shocked. Every year. Same people."
I don't say anything.
"You've been out here since eight last night."
"I know how long it's been."
"Yeah." She rocks back on her heels. "I figured."
She lets it be silent.
The sun's coming up behind the buildings and putting a line of pink along the top of the wall. The yard's all blue underneath it, and the cold out here has a size to it that it didn't have in the room.
"You could've frozen," Lashes says.
That's all.
She doesn't say it like a mother. She says it the way you'd tell somebody their taillight's out.
You could've frozen.
It comes up out of the floor of me.
My throat opens all the way, and the noise gets out before I can get a hand on it.
My eyes are already gone, hot and streaming, and the mug's tipping, so I put it on the edge of the fire pit and get both hands on my knees.
I'm bent over in a gravel yard making a sound I haven't made since I was twenty-two years old.
Nobody's said that to me.
That's all it took.
Years locked in a room, a man who whipped me, a man who choked me, all the forced abortions, and a woman I met yesterday says you could've frozen like it matters whether I'm cold, and I'm on my knees in the gravel.
Lashes doesn't touch me.
She doesn't say a word.
She stands there with her arms crossed, her back turned, and she lets me have it, and surprisingly, she doesn't leave.
When I can control myself and get upright, I drag my sleeve across my face, and she's exactly where she was.
"There's a shower in the room they gave you," she says. "Water takes a minute to get hot and then it gets hot. Don't stand under it while you're waiting."
"Okay."
"And I brought you clothes." She turns around.
"They won't fit. I'm four inches taller than you and I had a baby four months ago, so I'm carrying it in places you're not, and I want you to know I'm aware of that.
I'm not being stupid about it. It's clothes or it's what you've got on, and what you've got on smells like crap. "
That's true.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay." She nods once. "Try to get some sleep after."
"I don't sleep."
"Yeah, you do." She picks the mug up off the fire pit and puts it back in my hands. "Everybody thinks they don't. There's a lock on the inside of that door. Zorro put it on for you, so you’d feel more comfortable. We’re not blind to what you’ve been through, and some of us, even the Prez, have been captive and raped at some point in her life. Just… know you’re safe here, Mila. "
She starts for the clubhouse.
"Lashes."
She stops.
I don't have anything. I don't know why I said it.
There's a mug in my hands, my face is ruined, and there's a woman standing in the gravel waiting on me, and I've got nothing at all.
"Yeah," she says. "I know."
Then she goes.
* * *
The water takes a minute to get warm, and then it gets blood-curdling hot.
I stand under it with my forehead on the tile and let it run down my back.
The scar tissue doesn't feel it the way the rest of me does. It never does.
There's a whole map of me back there that's gone silent, and the live parts around it do all the reporting.
So what I get is a hot band across the top of my shoulders and nothing underneath.
I don't look.
There's a mirror in here, and I keep my back to it the whole time.
Marie had a full-length one in her bathroom.
She took it down within the first week I was there, never said why, and never put it back.
One night I came out, and she was at her kitchen table in the middle of the night with a cigarette she wasn't smoking.
She had told me how she thought the scars would fade, how they’d heal. I had to tell her they’d been split open so many times again and again that they never would.
Marie had hope I’d physically heal from my scars, but there’s no use in having it.
Then she made toast.
A woman who lost everything, making me toast because I was standing in her kitchen and she had to do something with her hands.
I get out of the shower and put on the clothes Lashes left for me.
They don't fit.
They’re four inches too long everywhere, and the shirt hangs off me like it's on a hook.
I lie down on top of the covers with my boots by the bed where I can reach them.
I'm not going to sleep.
I haven't slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch since I was twenty-two years old.
I don’t know if I ever can sleep soundly again.
I’m too damn worried about what could happen whenever I close my eyes.
Somehow, I end up sleeping for hours.
Food wakes me.
Not a noise, not the door, not the light going.
I come up flat on my back in the dark with my heart slamming and both hands already out looking for a wall, and there's a smell in this room that doesn't belong to it.
Chile and onion, and something underneath with cumin in it.
There's a strip of light under the door and voices past it.
A lot of them, somebody laughing, a chair going over on a hard floor, and four people yelling at once about it.
I lie there with my hand flat on my own chest and force myself to remember everything.
You're in Chihuahua.
The bed's against the east wall.
The door is nine feet away and the lock's on the inside and you're the one who turned it.
There's a window behind you with a screen and no bars on it.
Nobody in this building has ever hurt you.
Then I sit up in a strange bed with borrowed clothes and my hands going.
My hair is still damp from a shower I took hours ago.
I put my boots on, and I go find him.
The main room's got forty people in it, and every one of them sees me come through the door.
Not at once. The ones facing me first, then the ones who watch their faces change, and by the time I'm four steps in, a room that was roaring is a room that's talking.
Nobody stares. They all know.
Amara told them, or Razor did, or the news just travelled fast.
Every person at these tables knows what happened to me in a hole in Arizona.
And not one of them looks at me longer than a second.
They give it back to me. All forty. A big man with a beard at the far table catches my eye, gives me about a quarter of a nod, and goes straight back to his plate.
Finn's at the second table.
He's not hiding. He's sitting in the middle of the room with his back to the door and his elbows on either side of a plate he hasn't touched.
I don't go to him.
I take the seat at the end of the far table with the wall behind it, because it's got the wall behind it.
From there I can see the courtyard door, the kitchen door, and every hand in the room.
I sit down.
The woman across from me is maybe twenty-four with wet hair, a nursing textbook next to her plate, and she's got a spoon halfway up, and she puts it down and shoves the whole basket of tortillas at me like she's been waiting an hour for the chance.
"Nova," she says.
"Mila."
"I know." She's already got the pot. "Ruby made pozole rojo. I want you to understand something about Ruby's pozole. It’s no joke. People come back from Vegas talking about it. Grown men. It's a whole thing."
There's a bowl in front of me.
I don't remember agreeing to a bowl.
"Cabbage, radish, lime, all of it on top." She's pointing at things. "Not some of it. All of it, don't be polite, that's what it's there for. And the oregano's Mexican, not Italian, and if you can taste the difference, we can be friends."
The room's talking again. Somebody's arguing about a compressor.
I put the cabbage on.
"Radish," Nova says.
I put the radish on.
"There it is." She sits back with her arms crossed like she's watching a building go up. "Okay. Eat that."
I eat it.
My stomach doesn't work properly.
It hasn’t worked in nine years, and it didn't work in a Circle K in Elfrida, and it doesn't work now.
Six spoonfuls in, it starts to close, and I stop and put the spoon down.
Nobody says a word about it.
Nova keeps talking. Her clinicals, a professor she hates, a man named Doom who apparently can't be trusted alone with pancake batter.
She doesn't ask me one question.
Not one, for twenty-five straight minutes, and by minute four I've got it—she's trying to distract me.
I let her.
Down the table, Lashes has Hope on her shoulder, patting her back. She catches my eye once and looks away.
At the second table, Finn hasn't touched his plate.
He knows exactly where I am.
He's known since I came through the door.
He hasn't turned around one time, and his shoulders are up around his ears.
There's a man on either side of him, and neither one of them has said a word to him in half an hour.
They're not cruel about it. That's what I can't stand.
They just eat.
I get up.
The room drops a level again, and I walk past his table and I don't stop.
"Finn."
His head comes up.
"Let’s chat outside," I say, motioning toward the back door.
We both head out the back, and I sit on the cold stone. He stands.
Behind us, the noise of the club comes through the wall.
In front of us, there's a black desert and a fence somewhere out in it, and past that, the mountains I can't see anymore because the sun's gone.
I've got my backpack.
I brought it out, and I don't remember picking it up, and it's on my knees now with both my hands on it, and Finn's looking at it the way you'd look at a snake in a boot.
"Mila—"
"Sit down."
He sits.
The zipper catches at the third tooth. I work it sideways.
"I've got something to tell you," I say. "I need you not to talk while I do it. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"You're going to want to."
"I won't."
I get the zipper.
There's a manila envelope in there. It's gone soft at the corners from months of being carried, and I take it out and hold it in my lap and look at the beer can.
"My mother died in her kitchen," I say.
He doesn't move.
"On the floor between the stove and the table. My father died in the front room. They were there for a week before the mailman looked in the window." My voice is coming out, and I don't know where from. "It was a year and two months before I got out. I missed them by fourteen months, Finn."
He doesn't make a sound.
"They came for your address."
I'm looking at the can. I can't do this looking at him.
"They knew there was mail. I don't know how.
I've had months to think about it, and I don't know.
I'm never going to know, but they knew mail was coming to that house and they knew who it was from.
" My hands are flat on the envelope. "So, they came and they asked, and my parents didn't tell them where you were. "
He breathes in.
"They didn't tell them." My eyes are burning and there's water on my face, and I let it run. "Either of them. They had my mother on the floor of her own kitchen, and my father could have ended it with one word, and neither one of them said it."
The wall. The desert. The can in the fire pit.
"They died with your address in their mouths."
He doesn't say anything. He's not going to, and it's not because I told him not to.
I put the envelope on the bench between us.
"There were forty-one," I say.
He looks at it.
"Forty-one postcards over ten years." My chest won't fill and I go through it anyway. "Elko. Bullhead City. Winnemucca. Gallup. Some town in Idaho I've never heard of. No return address on one of them, and nothing written on the back of any of them, except the last two."
His hand comes out and stops six inches short.
"On those two you wrote okay." My chin's going and I don't stop it. "That's it. I’ve looked at those two cards for months, and I don't know what you were answering."
He's got his hand hanging over that envelope, and it's shaking so hard I can see it from here.
"There's cash in there too. Not all of it.
There's some in there because there's some in every single one.
" I can't get a breath and I don't wait for one.
"And my mother kept the envelopes, Finn.
Ten years of envelopes with your handwriting on them, in a fire safe under the stairs, with my passport, birth certificate, twenty thousand dollars, and a piece of paper with your address on it in my father's handwriting. "
His head goes down.
"They knew where you were." My voice goes all the way through and comes out the other side in pieces. "For years. They never told them, and they died on the floor of a house you've been paying the taxes on."
The wind comes across the yard.
"So, that's what your postcards bought. My parents’ deaths."