Chapter 2 #9
I let myself think of Adam only that once.
“Stop fucking shaking,” the man says, smacking me across the mouth. He grabs my hair in his fist and then he brutally shoves himself into me.
Do I scream? I don’t remember.
This is not happening to me. The person on this bed is a stranger.
Does it last for ten minutes? Ten hours? I don’t remember.
At some point, when he has used me and tossed me aside like a dirty tissue, when I am bruised and bleeding and curled on my side praying for it to be over, he stands up. I feel the slush of him between my thighs. “What’s your name?” he asks, pulling up his pants.
He is asking, I realize, for the documents.
He yanks me to a sitting position, and a moment later I am blinded by a flash of light. Blinking, I see him tuck a small camera back in his shirt pocket. “For the driver’s license photo,” he explains.
Every time I look at that ID I will remember this moment.
“I’ll be in touch,” he says as he closes the door on the way out.
“Ay, dios.”
I haven’t moved since he left. I haven’t slept. I’ve just stared at the wall. So when the door opens with a master key and a slice of light falls into my eyes, I wince. My lip feels swollen to twice its size.
Maria, the maid, kneels beside the bed. She sits me up gently, pulling down my dress. “Who did this to you?” she asks.
I did.
“Come, mija,” she says, and I let her lead me to the bathroom and watch her fill the tub with several inches of steaming water.
Maria holds me with a strong grip as I step into the tub.
She hums as she lathers soap onto a fresh washcloth and works her way down my arms, between my fingers, along my spine.
She unravels the ribbon from my braid and shampoos my hair, then rinses it.
“Como la luna,” she muses. Then she pushes the washcloth into my hands and gestures down between my legs, urging me to clean myself.
“Do not blame yourself,” she says. “So many women have a story like this.”
She thinks I was raped.
I don’t correct her.
“I will get you some clothes,” Maria says. She helps me get out of the tub and dry myself with a scratchy towel, then leaves for a moment and returns with a cheaply made brown housekeeping uniform. She kneels to buckle my jelly sandals. “Okay, come with me.”
“Where?”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “You cannot want to stay here,” Maria says. “I told Cletus that I have una migrana and am going home.”
“Cletus?”
“The manager of this shithole.”
That makes my lips twitch. Maria sees. “Ah,” she says. “There you are.” She glances at the pill bottles on the sink and swipes them into her apron pocket. She leads me to a rusted Ford in the parking lot.
Should I be going anywhere with a woman who is a virtual stranger? But then again, she’s already saved my life once.
As she pulls out of the motel parking lot, I say, “Thank you, Maria.”
She cuts a glance at me. “Maria?”
“It’s on your name tag.”
A laugh wheezes out of her. “My name is Ximena. But Cletus is a racist dickhead who thinks that’s too hard for people to pronounce when they need another roll of toilet paper.”
Of all the people I might meet in this new life—-of all the people who might have kept me from taking my life—-what are the odds that they would be a woman who understands what it’s like to have two identities, one for public consumption and one for private?
She slows at a red light. “You got a name?”
“Georgia,” I say. It gets easier, every time.
“Okay, Georgia. You gonna tell me what you’re running from?”
“What makes you think I’m running from something?”
“You’re not from around here, that’s for sure. Your accent’s not Southern. And,” she adds, “people don’t show up at the Shadyside Motel for a vacation.”
Maybe it is because of what happened to me last night. Maybe it is because this woman has showed me kindness. “I lost a baby,” I say softly.
Ximena’s gaze shoots to my stomach.
“She was two months old,” I clarify.
“I figured it had to be something like that,” Ximena says quietly. “When I found you that other time.” She parallel--parks in front of a squat little condo. “Welcome home.”
Two girls are in the living room. “Girls,” Ximena says, “this is Georgia,” as if she brings in strays all the time.
Mercedes is fourteen, with black hair that reaches past her bottom and a heart--shaped beauty mark above her lip.
Milagros is younger—-ten—-with a gap between her front teeth and riotous curls.
The television is on, and Mercedes is slumped on the couch watching it as Milagros weaves a friendship bracelet out of embroidery floss.
I feel a little pang under my ribs, imagining Molly at that age. Will she be sassy or aggrieved, or my willing shadow?
Milagros hugs Ximena. “Any treasures, mami?” she asks. The little girl stuffs her hands in the pocket of her mother’s maid uniform and pulls out my prescription bottles.
“Oh, whoops, nope, mija,” Ximena says, plucking the bottles away and handing them to me.
“Sometimes when there’s candy or something left behind in a room, I’ll bring it to her,” she explains.
“Georgia needs a little bit of rest, so, Milagros, she’s going to borrow your room. You get to sleep in my bed with me.”
“Does she have to share our bathroom?” Mercedes asks.
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch my shit,” she says.
“Language,” Ximena chides. She takes the younger girl’s hand and leads her upstairs as I follow. Milagros keeps looking at me over her shoulder.
“Don’t you have school today?” I ask, trying to sound like I’m making conversation, but it comes out like an accusation.
“It’s Saturday,” she says.
“While you change,” Ximena says, “I will get fresh sheets.” She gives me an oversize sweatshirt that belongs to Mercedes and a pair of leggings and clean underwear.
In the bathroom, I strip out of the borrowed maid’s uniform and stare in the mirror at the bruises on my hips and my breasts, the cut on my bottom lip and the puffy swell of the top one.
I am amazed by the tenacity of my body. That it could grow another human.
That it could survive a hijacking of the brain and a suicide attempt and a violation of intimacy.
That it could register the marks of violence in these handprints, and then, eventually, heal them.
Every time I have tried to jettison this skin I’m in, I wind up grateful that it’s kept me from falling apart.
I collapse on Milagros’s bed. When I open my eyes again, the sky outside her window is pitch--dark.
I pad downstairs in my bare feet. Ximena is washing dishes. It’s strange to see her in normal clothes, instead of a uniform. “I didn’t mean to sleep this long,” I say.
She turns, her hands soapy. “You needed it.” She shrugs.
I pick up a dish towel and start drying the pieces in the rack. “I will be out of your hair tomorrow morning,” I promise.
“And do what?” When I don’t respond, she raises a brow. “That’s what I thought. You can stay here till you get back on your feet. Milagros loves sleepovers with Mami.”
At several flash points in my life, I’ve been the recipient of radical kindness, but it never ceases to take my breath away. Ms. Robichaud and her sister. Evie. And now, Ximena.
Ximena says she has been in Atlanta nine years. Her husband got messed up with some bad people in El Salvador and was killed. She came to the U.S. with a five--year--old and an infant.
We wind up at the kitchen table with a bottle of tequila. I have never been a big drinker, so I find myself asking her questions I wouldn’t normally dare to ask, slurring my words.
“When I first got here, I worked at the Ritz in Buckhead,” Ximena says proudly. “I had a friend there who got me the housekeeping job. The things rich people leave lying around! Drugs on the counter. Loaded guns. Used condoms on the floor. I mean, who does that? But . . . dios, the tips there!”
“Why did you leave?”
“That same friend was taken in an immigration raid and deported,” Ximena says. “I got a job at the Shadyside. It’s a dump, but it’s also easier to fly under the radar there.”
I lean my elbows on the table, my vision swimming. “What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw at the Ritz?”
“There was one guest who wrote a list of numbers in permanent marker right on the wall—-from one to nineteen—-with a little cartoon pene next to it. Pretty sure it was the number of times he’d had sex that night.
We had to have maintenance repaint, but good for him, right?
Once a guest left something locked in the safe and insisted we mail it to them, and it turned out to be a Taco Bell chalupa.
And then there was the guy I found unconscious with a needle sticking out of his arm. ”
“So,” I say and swallow. “I wasn’t your first.”
Ximena shakes her head.
“I was really sick when I got here,” I confess. “I didn’t know it, but I was bipolar.”
She tilts her head. “It came out of nowhere?”
“Only after I had my baby.” My cheeks flame. “I was not a very good mother.”
Ximena refills both of our glasses. “When I was working at the Ritz, a guest came back from a business meeting and found a baby on her bed. Security got called in because, you know, who leaves a baby? At first, they thought maybe it was dead, but she was healthy and clean and just asleep. They were about to call the police when my friend, the other maid, heard what had happened from a security guard. She told the manager it was a misunderstanding, and that she’d take the baby back to its mother.
And then she found me.” Ximena meets my gaze.
“Because I was the one who’d left the baby on the bed. ”
“Milagros?”