Rules
Maribel
I wait for the catch all morning.
There’s always a catch. Last night I got a door that locks from my side, a bed with clean sheets, and a man who sat on the floor all night so I could sleep for the first time since I left Cuba.
Somebody is going to want something for that. I lie on top of the covers with my bag under my arm and wait for the knock that tells me what it costs.
The knock is a woman.
“I’m Beth.” She’s blonde, dressed for an office, and she has a ring on her hand that catches the light when she holds up a paper bag.
“Torque’s wife. I have a nine o’clock and no talent for being gentle, so here’s what’s in the bag.
Clothes, close enough to your size. Underwear with the tags on.
A phone with our numbers in it and nobody else’s.
An envelope with money for incidentals. The bathroom is second door on the left and the lock works. Towels are on the shelf.”
I don’t take the bag. She sets it inside the door without stepping over the line.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” she says. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. If you want a woman in the building who isn’t one of them, that’s me. Number’s in the phone.” She checks her watch. “Eat something. Ortiz will hover until you do.”
She’s gone before I decide what my face is doing.
The shower is the first thing I’ve chosen in a long time. I stand under it until the water goes cool. I don’t look at the mirror going in. Coming out, I make myself look, once, at the bruises I already know about and the woman who used to be called pretty drowning in them.
She looks tired. She looks angry. I can work with angry.
The hallway has doors on both sides and a room at the end with a couch and a television nobody’s watching. A man is at the stove with his weight on one leg, and he’s burning eggs with real commitment.
“Morning.” He doesn’t turn around. “Coffee’s bad. Eggs are worse. I’m Hendrix, and I live down the hall until my leg stops being an asshole.” He slides a plate onto the counter. “Sit, beautiful. You’re hovering.”
I stop where I am.
I don’t know what to do with that. My hands go still on the strap of the bag. He looks over his shoulder, sees whatever is on my face, and turns back to the pan without a beat.
“Okay, sorry about that. I’ve been called a flirt. I’ll try to stop,” he says, easy. “Eat, Maribel.”
I sit. I eat. The eggs are terrible. He whistles at the stove and doesn’t look at me again, and after a while my hands let go of the strap.
Mateo comes in from the stairs with his hair wet. He stops when he sees me at the counter. His shoulders let go. He covers it by going to the coffee.
“Rules,” I tell him.
He turns around with the pot in his hand. “Go.”
“Nobody comes in my room. Nobody touches me without asking first. Not you, not the doctor, not anyone.”
“Okay.”
“I go where I want in this building.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you already decided before I said it.”
He pours the coffee. “I did. Torque’s rules override yours. His job is to keep everyone inside these walls safe.”
Hendrix laughs at the stove. I look at him. He lifts both hands, spatula and all, and goes back to the pan.
Doc wants to examine my feet again. His room downstairs smells of antiseptic. He unwraps me without asking, which is fine, because I already said he could. He presses. I don’t move.
“You looked at them last night,” I say.
“I’m looking again.”
“Then look faster.”
His mouth moves at one corner. He doesn’t look up. “Faster. Fine.” He wraps me back up and hands me a pair of rubber sandals that don’t fit. “Walk on the heels. Don’t run.”
“I don’t run anymore. Learned that the hard way.”
“Understood.”
I walk the building because I said I would. The bar downstairs is chairs on tables and a smell of bleach, bigger in daylight, with a pool table in the back and a burn in the felt. A hallway goes back past an office with the door shut. There’s a steel door at the end that says nothing.
There’s another door under the stairs with a padlock on it, and a man leaning next to it who nods at me once and doesn’t speak. There’s a small room with a heavy bag hanging in the middle and rubber on the floor. I stand in the doorway of that one longer than the others.
Mateo finds me on the way back down the hall. He falls in beside me without a word, and when the hall opens into the bar, he moves. He puts himself between me and the room. Wall on my side, him on the other.
I stop walking. “I’m not seven anymore.”
He stops too. “I know how old you are.”
“Then stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“You know what. You did it on the street with the lights burned out. You did it on the stairs last night. I’m not going to fall in the road.”
He looks at me. He’s so much bigger than the boy that it should be a stranger looking at me. It isn’t. But the boy never had a beard, or a jaw like that under it, or hands that could close around my whole arm.
For one second I look at him the way a woman looks at a man across a bar. I don’t know where that comes from. I put it away. The boy used to get exactly this look when I caught him at something, half caught and half not sorry.
“I know you’re not seven,” he says. “Because I’m not ten.”
“Then walk next to me.”
He walks next to me. He hates it. I can tell he hates it, and I’m surprised how much I like that.
By afternoon the building has a sound to it. Boots, a phone ringing in the office, the lean one from last night going past me with a case of beer on his shoulder and saying, “Mess. In case nobody told you,” without slowing down.
Hendrix comes down the stairs one step at a time with a hand on the rail and tells the room he’s fine before anyone asks. He sits across from me at a table by the window with a deck of cards and doesn’t deal them.
“So what was he like,” he says. “Ortiz. Before.”
“Constipated.”
Hendrix looks at me. Then he puts his head back and laughs so hard he has to hold his side.
I laugh too.
It comes out of me before I know it’s there, one sound, and I put my hand over my mouth like I can push it back in. I hate it. I hate that it’s still in me and that this is where it came out, at a table in a biker bar, at a joke about a boy who was my whole world.
Hendrix sees my face and stops laughing. He doesn’t say anything about it. He deals the cards.
Mateo is behind the bar. He heard. He’s looking at me with the towel gone still in his hands, and I look back until he has to be the one to turn away.
The bar fills up after dark. I go up to my room before it does, because I don’t have it in me yet, the noise, the men. I sit on the bed with the window open over the lot. Bikes come and go. The sign hums.
Late, when the noise downstairs is finally dying, one bike comes off the strip slow and stops at the edge of the gravel with its light on.
It doesn’t park. It idles.
I know the sound of a bike that isn’t coming in. I heard it every night outside a window I couldn’t open.
They kept me in one room for six days. I heard men in the hall and motorcycles coming and going outside.
Santo hurt me. His younger brother, Cristo, brought food when Santo wasn’t there and locked the door again afterward.
He never pretended he didn’t know what was happening.
His job was making sure I was still there when Santo came back.
The others were voices, boots, shadows under the door.
Rook goes across the lot toward it. Halfway there he changes his mind, turns around, and goes inside fast to get Torque.