14. Chapter Fourteen Grace
Chapter Fourteen: Grace
The memories come as soon as I get home, as soon as the adrenaline wears off and I have a moment to breathe, to think.
Not fragments. Not flashes. Not the single-frame images that have been bleeding through the cracks for the past week.
These are full, continuous, unbroken sequences that arrive in my body before they arrive in my brain, so the first thing I feel is the cold before I see the room, and the first thing I hear is the door before I know what's behind it.
I'm in my apartment. It's four in the morning. I haven't slept. I've been lying in bed since midnight, staring at the ceiling, running Carmelo's words through my head on a loop that won't stop.
Your name is Graziella Ferrara.
You were taken when you were eight years old.
You were trafficked for five years.
The words are in my head but they're not in my body yet.
They're information. Data points. Facts about a person named Graziella who was taken and trafficked and drugged, and I've been lying here for four hours trying to connect those facts to the woman lying in this bed in this apartment in South Philadelphia, and the connection won't form because the pills spent eleven years building a wall between the facts and the feeling and the wall is still standing.
At four eleven, the wall comes down.
It starts with the cold. My feet go numb.
Not the apartment, not the temperature. My feet go numb from the inside, the way they went numb on a concrete floor in a room with no windows when I was nine years old, and I know this because I'm there.
I'm in the room. I'm not remembering the room.
I'm IN the room. My body is in my bed in Philadelphia, and my mind is on a floor in a place I don't have a name for, and the two realities exist at the same time and neither one will let go.
The floor is gray. The walls are gray. There's a metal door with a slot at the bottom where food comes through, when it comes, which is not always.
The light is a single bulb above the door, caged in a metal box, always on.
There's no window. There's no clock. Time doesn't exist in this room.
Only the door exists, and what happens when it opens.
I know what happens when it opens.
The memory arrives and I hear myself scream from very far away, from the bed in Philadelphia, from the apartment above the restaurant, from the life I built on top of a lie.
The scream is in Italian. I know this now because Carmelo told me I was Italian, and the language coming out of my mouth is the language I spoke when I was a child.
The language that made my skin crawl every time I heard it for eleven years because my body associated it with the room and the door and the men who came through it.
The men.
I remember the men.
Not their faces. Not yet. But their hands.
Their shoes. The sounds they made. The weight of an adult body on a child's body.
The specific physical sensations that I have no framework for because I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the things they did to me didn't have names in any language I knew and the pills took even the nameless memory of them and locked it behind a chemical wall that held for eleven years and is now collapsing.
I'm on the floor. Not the concrete floor.
My bathroom floor. I made it to the bathroom before the vomiting started and I'm on my knees on the tile and my body is expelling everything it held for eleven years.
Not food. Something deeper. A physical purge that comes from my stomach and my chest and the base of my spine, convulsive, violent, my body turning itself inside out to get the memories out, or to get them in, I can't tell which.
My finger is tapping the tile. Fast. Frantic. The same tile, the same finger, the same rhythm that started on a concrete floor in a room with no windows when a small girl needed to know she was still alive.
I am that girl. The tapping started with her. She started it and I kept it and I never knew why and now I know and the knowing is worse than the not knowing because the not knowing was a blank space and the knowing is a room with a door and hands and sounds I can't unhear.
The memories don't come in order. I feel everything before I see anything, and what I feel is old and huge and has been living in my body for sixteen years, curled in the dark, fed by pills, kept quiet.
I'm eight. I'm in a car. It's dark outside.
A man's hand is over my mouth. I can't breathe through his fingers and I'm trying to scream, and the sound won't come because his palm is too tight.
I can smell cigarettes on his skin. Not tobacco, not the warm sweet tobacco from a cigar.
Cigarettes. Stale and bitter. The difference between those two smells is the difference between safety and this, and my body knew. My body always knew.
I'm ten. I'm in a different room. This one has a window, but the window has bars and the glass is painted over so the light comes through white and diffuse.
There's a bed. A mattress on a metal frame.
The sheets are gray. Everything is gray.
I'm sitting on the bed with my knees pulled up and my finger is tapping the metal frame, one beat, two beats, three, and the door opens.
I'm twelve. I'm in a bathroom. Not my bathroom.
A bathroom with a drain in the floor and a showerhead mounted to the wall and no curtain.
I'm standing under cold water, and my body is covered in bruises, some old, some new, color on my skin that tells the history of the last four years in purple and yellow and green.
My finger taps the wall. The tile is cold and wet and my finger slips, and I tap again, harder, and again, and the tapping is the only thing that's mine.
Everything else belongs to them. My body, my name, my time, my sleep, my waking, my eating, my standing, my lying down.
The tapping is the one thing they can't take because they don't notice it and they don't care about it and it's so small and so quiet that it exists beneath their attention.
I'm thirteen. I'm in an office. Fluorescent lights.
A desk with papers. A man in a white coat.
Not one of the men from the rooms. A different man.
Older. Glasses. He's speaking English, not Italian, and the switch in language is disorienting after five years.
He puts a needle in my arm and the world goes soft.
Not dark. Soft. The edges of everything blur.
The memories fold up. Not gone. Just folded, tucked away, placed in a drawer that I don't have a key to.
He gives me a pill. Small. White. "For anxiety," he says. "Take one every morning."
The last thing I remember before the wall goes up is my finger tapping the arm of the chair I'm sitting in.
One beat. Two beats. Fast. And then nothing.
And then I'm thirteen and my name is Grace and my parents died in an accident and I live in Philadelphia with Paul and Linda Marino and I take a pill every morning for anxiety and I don't remember anything before this moment.
Eleven years of nothing.
Until now.
I'm on my bathroom floor and my face is against the tile and I'm crying in Italian, full sentences, words I've known since I was born and forgot at thirteen and my mouth is giving them back to me one at a time. Papa. Casa. Aiutami. Non mi lasciare. Fa male. Fa male. Fa male.
It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.
I don't know how long I'm on the floor. An hour.
Maybe two. The memories keep coming. Not all of them.
Not every day of five years. Pieces. The room with no windows.
The room with the painted window. The bathroom with the drain.
The men, faceless, their hands and their weight.
The smell of cigarettes. The cold of the floor.
The tapping, always the tapping, the one constant across five years and eleven years and right now on my bathroom floor.
When the wave passes, I'm empty. Hollow. My body is wrung out, limp, lying on the tile in a t-shirt and underwear. My hair is wet from sweat and my face is wet from crying and the tile is wet from the vomiting and I'm lying in the wreckage of my own history.
I need him.
I reach for my phone. It's on the bed. I can see it from the bathroom floor through the open door, the screen dark on the pillow where I left it four hours ago. I crawl to it. My legs won't hold me. I pick it up and I find his name and I press call.
One ring.
"Grace." He was waiting.
"Come here."
I don't say please. I don't say I need you. I say come here the way you say it when there's no room for anything else. Two words. He taught me that. Two words can be enough.
"Two minutes," he says.
He hangs up. I count the seconds. At eighty-seven, there's a knock at my door.
Not loud. Two knocks. I crawl to the door and unlock it from the floor, and he pushes it open and finds me on my hands and knees in the hallway of my apartment and he doesn't say anything.
He picks me up. Both arms, all of me, the way you pick up something that weighs nothing, and he carries me to the bed, puts me down, lies down next to me, wraps his body around mine and holds.
I am being carried. Small arms around a neck. The smell of tobacco and something sweet.
The fragment from weeks ago. The one that had a person in it. Someone carrying me, someone whose neck I was holding. That was Renzo. My father. Carrying me somewhere safe, before they took me.
Carmelo is carrying me now. Not my father.
Not the men from the rooms. A man I chose.
A man who chose me first, months before I knew his name, and who killed the people who kept me in the dark, and who lied to me and fucked me and told me the truth while I sat on a bar with my pants around my ankle, and who came to my door in seconds when I said two words.
"I remember," I say against his chest.
"I know."
"The rooms. The men. The floor. The tapping. All of it."
His arms tighten around me. His face is in my hair. I can feel his heartbeat against my back, fast, and his breathing is uneven and his body is tense in a way that tells me he's holding himself together the same way I'm holding myself together, which is barely.
"My name is Graziella," I say.
"Yes."
"I speak Italian."
"Yes."
"I was eight."
His arms tighten again. Tighter. I can feel the muscles in his forearms flex against my stomach and his chest expand against my back, his chin presses into the top of my head and he's holding me so hard it hurts and I don't want him to stop.
"I need you," I whisper. "Right now. I need you inside me. I need to feel something that I chose."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't say are you sure.
He doesn't handle me or manage me or ask if this is the right time.
He rolls me onto my back and puts his weight over me and his forearms are on either side of my head.
His face is above mine and his gray eyes are wet.
Carmelo is crying. Not sobbing, not breaking down.
Tears running from the corners of his eyes into the stubble on his jaw.
Silent. The way a man cries when he can't stop it and won't acknowledge it.
I put my hands on his face. I wipe the tears with my thumbs.
He turns his head and presses his mouth into my palm, his lips are warm and his stubble scrapes my skin and I pull him down.
He kisses my face, everywhere the tears touch, his lips are there, kissing the pain away.
I buck my hips and slide my underwear off before working on his pants, being kissed over and over.
Like he’s trying to drive the memories away. Not lock them up, but replace them.
The sex is slow. Not gentle, not careful.
Slow. Every movement intentional. He enters me and holds still and breathes.
I breathe and we look at each other and there's no hiding and no pretending and no roles to play.
He knows everything about me. I know everything about me.
The room and the floor and the men and the pills and the name and the father.
All of it is in the bed with us and he moves inside me anyway, I move with him anyway and the memories are dimming and the pleasure is there and they exist at the same time.
It’s almost transcendent, in the way it’s taking me from the place in my mind that keeps me trapped, and moves me to a place where there is no pain, no memories, just bliss.
My finger taps his shoulder. The rhythm matches his movement. Slow. Steady. Not anxiety. Not survival. Rhythm. Connection. My body finding a new reason for the oldest thing it knows.
I come quietly. No scream, no cry. A wave that moves through me from the center outward, warm, and I hold his face in my hands while it happens, and his forehead is against mine and his tears fall on my cheeks.
His body presses deep into mine as he comes inside me, his arms shaking, his breath ragged against my neck. He says my name. Not Grace. The other one.
"Graziella."
And it sounds like a dream. Something I want to know… someone I want to be.
We lie tangled in my bed. His body curled around mine, massive, warm, the arm draped over my waist heavy enough that I can feel it with every breath.
"I want to meet my father," I say.
"I'll call him."
"And Carmelo."
"Yes."
"Don't ever lie to me again."
His arm tightens. His mouth presses against the back of my neck.
"Never," he says.
I close my eyes. For the first time in a week, I sleep. Deep, heavy, dreamless sleep. Not because the memories are gone. Because they're here, all of them, and I survived them once and I'm surviving them now and the man holding me knows every single one of them and he's still here.
My finger circles small circles on his forearm in my sleep.
The rhythm of a woman who just found out who the fuck she is.