Chapter 11
MILA
Two soft knocks at the door.
“Car’s ready, ma fille.”
I’m already dressed when the knock comes, the folding knife in the pocket of the sweater, my hand on the door before Maria finishes speaking.
Maria looks at me. Then at the door across the hall. Then back at me.
“You sleep alright?”
The Cajun is thicker than usual. She’s fighting a smile and losing.
“Grand-mère got the thermos going. You want I walk you down?”
I don’t answer.
She presses her lips together. Her eyes are bright.
“Mm-hm.”
One sound. She turns and walks toward the back stairs, her shoulders shaking.
I follow.
Nonna Rosa is at the stove, her back to me. The household pot is going. The thermos is on the marble.
“Bread in the cloth, cher. Take it. Take one for Sofia.”
I take the bread.
She turns. Her gaze moves down my face, my neck, the line of my shoulders.
“Cher. You got some color back.”
She turns back to the stove. “Eat the bread in the car. Don’t save it. You save everything. Some things are made for eating, not saving.”
She pours coffee into the thermos, seals it, sets it on the counter, and goes back to her pot.
I pick up the thermos and the bread.
I dip my chin at her back. She doesn’t turn around.
Nico is at the SUV. The back door is already open. Sofia is inside, notebook against her chest, hair pulled back, the dress one of Maria’s that fits her now.
He has his hand on the open passenger door. He doesn’t look at me until I’m standing at it.
His jaw is tight. His shoulders fill the doorframe the way they always do, broad and solid, and I am already not-looking by the time his eyes find mine, and then I am looking again.
Then he looks at me.
My stomach drops and pulls at the same time. Want and warning, the two of them arriving together. I get in.
“Buongiorno, Mila,” Sofia says from the back, her voice rough.
She’s holding the notebook with both hands in the rearview. The dress moves against her ribs. She’s breathing fast.
I nod.
Sofia exhales.
Nico closes my door, walks around, and gets in.
Before he starts the engine, he adjusts the rearview to Sofia, then to the road. “New route in. Marco shifted this morning. Same way home.”
Sofia nods.
“He’ll tell me more when there’s more to tell.”
He starts the engine.
We pull out of the compound gate. Magazine. Our usual. Then a left I don’t recognize at the second light. The streetcar tracks bend right where the SUV bends left.
The houses on this street are higher and whiter, the verandahs deeper. A woman with a stroller is on one of them, drinking from a cup that matches the saucer.
Nico’s right hand is on the gearshift. I look at it longer than I should. I want to stop looking. I don’t stop for another full second.
At the next light, he opens the cooler in the console.
“Water.”
He hands me the bottle without turning his head. Our fingers brush at the cap.
My pulse goes loud in my ears. The skin where his finger touched mine stays warm after he’s pulled his hand back, warm enough that I press my palm flat against my thigh to hold it against my skin. I want to keep it. That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to keep it. I take the bottle.
The word comes out before I can stop it, cracked.
“Spasibo.” Thank you.
Nico’s hand goes white on the gearshift. The tendons stand out across the back of his hand. The leather doesn’t give under his grip.
One full second.
His throat moves.
“Pozhaluysta.”
The word lands in my chest before I can stop it, warm and exact, like being handed something I didn’t know I was missing. His voice unhurried. Like he says it to no one else, and I know that’s not true, and I want it to be true anyway.
He doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t look at me. He puts the SUV in first. The clutch out. We move with the light.
Sofia in the back stops moving.
I drink the water.
I look at the water bottle. At the streetcar tracks. At a man walking a dog on the neutral ground. Anywhere that isn’t him.
He keeps his eyes on the road.
The gearshift between us is the only thing in the SUV that’s moving.
The badges are different at the gate. Plain black, no Casa Lucia script. Marco’s men at the corners in plainclothes. My chest tightens and I keep my face still as we step out of the SUV.
“All clear. Cassia rerouted the morning intake.”
Nico nods. “Tell her thank you.”
“Will do, boss.”
Nico’s hand rises toward the small of my back. I feel the air behind me change, the heat of his palm a half-inch from my spine, and then it’s gone. His hand comes back down to his side.
I keep walking. I don’t stop. I don’t turn around. My back is warm where he almost touched me, and the almost is louder than any hand that ever landed on me.
Sofia is at my elbow, notebook against her chest, and we walk into the building together.
The group room has eight chairs in a loose half-circle.
The therapist is in scrubs. She speaks slowly, like she’s checking each word before she puts it down.
She nods to me and Sofia at the door.
“Sit anywhere.”
We sit at the back, near the window.
The other women come in.
The blonde woman’s eyes go flat the moment she sits. The Vietnamese woman’s left hand hasn’t left her right. The Romanian girl has stopped flinching at doors. The note-taker is in the corner chair. Another survivor.
The chair next to me is empty when the room starts.
The door swings open hard.
“Bozhe moy,” the voice says. “Bozhe moy, I’m late, I am late again, Lord forgive me, this child is going to come out of me sideways, I swear it on my mother. Mila, scoot over, milaya, I have eight months of belly and I cannot fit in the corner.”
Oksana.
She drops into the chair next to me, the belly arriving two seconds before she does.
She’s wearing a man’s button-down shirt with the bottom two buttons undone. Her hair is dyed three shades of red and piled loose at the crown of her head.
A wedding ring is on a chain around her neck. Thin gold.
She catches me looking.
“My mother’s,” she says. Her hand goes to the chain. “My mother sent me this when I told her I was keeping the baby. She said, put it around your neck, dochka. Wear it until he is born and then put it on his ankle so he knows someone loved him before he had a name.”
Nobody speaks. Nobody moves.
Oksana looks at me.
“You want to know,” she says.
It’s not a question.
She leans back in the chair. Her hand rests on the belly. She looks at the window.
“I was nineteen,” she says. “I lived in Budapest. A friend sent me a photo from Vienna. She was working as a hostess at a club. Good money, nice apartment, she looked happy.”
Her jaw tightens once.
“She was not happy. The apartment was not hers. She had been there six months and she could not leave.”
A pause.
“I didn’t know any of this. I took the bus.”
I know what comes next. Not the details. The shape. I know that shape the way you know a scar without looking at it. My stomach closes around itself and my hands go still in my lap and I don’t move them.
“They picked me up at the station. Took my passport at the car. Drove me to a building with bars on the windows. The bars were painted white. They looked decorative if you didn’t try to open them.”
Her voice is flat. No waver. No crack. The voice of a woman who has told this story to herself so many times it no longer shakes coming out. I know that voice. I have used it. I used it so long I forgot what the shaking felt like.
“Two years. They moved me six times. I stopped counting borders. I stopped counting men after the first month.”
Sofia’s hand finds mine. Her fingers lock. She’s shaking and I’m not. I’m somewhere past shaking. Somewhere very still.
The Vietnamese woman’s hands are flat on her thighs. The Romanian girl has her eyes on the floor, her spine straight, doing exactly what I’m doing.
“The last house was on Bourbon Street. Above a bar. The windows had iron shutters that locked from the outside. You could hear the music through the floor at night. Jazz. Tourists. People laughing.”
She stops.
“One of the men at that house assaulted me. I got pregnant.”
My stomach goes hollow.
“I didn’t choose him. I chose to keep him. That’s the only choice I had and I took it with both hands.”
Her shoulders pull back.
“He’s mine. He came from the worst thing that ever happened to me and he’s the best thing I have.”
Sofia makes a sound, small and choked, her grip on my hand going tight. I hold on. I don’t know who I’m steadying.
The blonde woman hasn’t moved since Oksana started.
Oksana’s mouth curves.
“Cassia found me when the house was raided. She didn’t ask me what I wanted to do. She asked me where I wanted to go. I said I don’t know. She said, come here then, until you do.”
Her hand moves in that slow circle on her belly.
“I’ve been here six months. I still don’t know where I want to go. But I know his name. I’m going to call him András, after my grandfather, who was a stubborn man and died at ninety-four still arguing with his doctor.”
“He’ll need a stubborn name,” I say.
Oksana’s smile deepens.
My eyes sting. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and breathe through it. I am not going to cry in this room. I am not going to be the one who breaks in this room. I breathe through it.
Oksana leans her head toward mine.
“He kicked in the night. He has taste in music already, only the loud kind.” Her eyes soften for one beat. “He’s going to be impossible. I can’t wait.”
She lays her hand flat on the belly. Looks at me.
“You want to feel?”
Her hand on the belly. Sofia on my other side, eyes down, shaking.
I open my mouth.
“Boy?”
Oksana’s mouth opens.
“Boy.” Her voice has gone small. “It’s a boy.”
Oksana’s breath catches. “Mila. Oh, Mila.”
She’s crying. Full-volume, no apology. The tears slide down her cheeks and she doesn’t wipe them.
“Mila. Mila.”
Sofia takes my left hand in her right. Light. Asking.
I let her have it.
The therapist writes one line on her tablet across the room and doesn’t look up.
The blonde woman has gone quiet.