If She Wasnt Here
Maribel
The lights wake me.
Every one in the building comes on at once, and the hall outside my door goes bright under the crack. I’m on my feet before I know what I heard. Boots on the stairs. Rook’s voice out front, high, yelling something at the street.
I get to the window. Rook is in the middle of the road with his gun out. My heart races as I stare outside. Finally, I spot Mateo with his hands hanging wrong at his sides.
A car pulls away from the far curb with its lights off. A bike goes after it, wobbling, no helmet on the man riding it.
I’m on the stairs before I decide to be, reaching the front door in my bare feet when they come in, Steel and Mateo. Torque and Mess are behind them.
Mateo’s hands are covered in blood.
I get to him, putting both of them in mine before anyone can stop me. They’re hot and wet, and one of the knuckles is already opening up. He lets me hold them for one second with the whole club watching.
“I’m okay,” he says.
“What happened?”
“Later.”
“Mateo.”
“There were three. Steel stopped the third from putting a knife in my back.” He says it flat, the way you say a thing you don’t want to say again. “I’m okay.”
Torque says, “Church. Now,” and doesn’t say it twice.
Mateo takes his hands out of mine. “Go up, Pluma. I’ll come.”
I look at Torque. Torque looks at me the way he did on the step the first night, adding things up. Then he looks at the office door, and that’s the end of it. This is his building. I go up.
I sit on the bed with the light off and the shark on the pillow and wait for the door. I can hear men downstairs, not the words, only the sound. It goes on a long time. The blood on my palms dries and cracks. I don’t wash it off.
He doesn’t come.
I go down to find him. That’s all I’m doing. I’m going to the office to get my man and walk him up the stairs and put something on his hands. The office door is open a crack, and I hear my name.
I’d have walked past it. I’ve walked past that door with men talking behind it every day since I got here. I stop because the voice that says it is Steel’s.
“Maribel’s the problem.”
I stand in the hall with the bar dark behind me as my heart does a somersault.
“Choose your next fucking words carefully.” That’s Mateo, low, the way he was in the parking lot.
“Santo knows she’s your weak spot. As long as she’s here, he has a way to get at you.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying this gets worse because of her. Brothers could die.”
No, not Steel. My stomach tightens and then flips over.
“He’s not wrong,” Mess says.
Then Steel again, not to Mateo. To Torque. “If she wasn’t here, Santo wouldn’t have anything to push. She’s putting the whole club at risk.”
I don’t hear what Torque says. I’m already going, back up the stairs in my bare feet, and I don’t feel the steps.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The shark looks at me from the pillow with his mouth on wrong.
Steel. Of all of them. Steel, who shut the mat room door and taught me the thumb. Steel, who said “she asked” to Mateo’s face. Steel, who stood next to me at the cage and told me to watch the hips and then told me to watch the fight. Steel, who caught a knife that was going into Mateo’s back.
I thought that man had my back. I don’t think he was lying to me. That’s what’s worst. I think he’s been counting the cost of me the whole time, and tonight he watched the bill almost come due, and finally said it out loud.
He’s not wrong, Mess said. He isn’t. I know that better than any of them. I walked up to this building with blood on my feet and Los Muertos behind me. Every night since, somebody has sat on a bike across the street because of it.
Torque doesn’t sleep. Rook walks the gravel in the rain.
Hendrix can’t run on that leg and he’s the one sitting by the door with the cash.
In a parking lot Mateo took one step and stopped, and I saw what stopping cost him.
Tonight he didn’t stop. He crossed four lanes for one man on a bike, and he never saw the knife.
If she wasn’t here…
I can finish that sentence. I’ve been finishing sentences like that my whole life. If she wasn’t here, they’d be safe. If she wasn’t here, he’d have stayed on this side of the street.
He’ll do it again. I know him. He’ll cross that street every night there’s a man on it, because I’m in the window above it.
Next time there’s no Steel behind him, or the knife is faster, and he dies on the pavement for me with the whole club watching and the whole club paying.
Nobody in my life has ever been worth that.
He’s not going to be the one who proves it.
I’m not going to sit on this bed in a red shirt and let that happen because this is the first time in my life I’ve felt like a whole woman.
I don’t write anything down. There’s nothing to write that Mateo won’t already know when he sees the bag gone.
He crossed a street for me tonight. He’ll know exactly why I’m not here.
I put on my jeans and my shoes. I take the bag with the tin in the lining, and the envelope with my papers and money.
After I’ve got the strap on my shoulder I stand there and look at the shark for a second.
Then I take him too, under my arm, because I’m not leaving him for somebody to throw away.
I use the phone Beth gave me to find the bus terminal. A city bus stops at the end of the block before long. From the terminal I can get out of Miami before morning. I don’t care which direction. Any direction that takes Santo away from Black Flag is the right one.
I stand at the window with my bag on my shoulder and look across the street.
The curb is empty. He emptied it. Los Muertos is three men down tonight, and I know how men like that work. They go home and lick it. They come back tomorrow, with more, and they come for him.
Tomorrow is the only thing I can take away from them.
Down in the lot, Rook walks the front gravel once, turns the corner, and disappears around the back of the building.
The street is empty. The watcher is gone. Rook is checking the back.
This is as clear as the door is going to get.
I get to the end of the block.
The bike comes off the strip with its light off. I hear it before I see it, the sound I know best in the world, and it’s not stopping across the street tonight. It comes up over the curb onto the sidewalk in front of me and stops so close the heat off the pipe hits my legs.
I know the colors before I know the man. Skull. Jaw. My body goes to water the way it did in the parking lot, and this time nobody has my waist.
“Mu?eca,” Cristo says. “You look pretty wearing his blood.”
He comes off the bike with it still running and comes for my arm, because they always come for the arm.
I turn out through his thumb the way Steel showed me, and his hand closes on nothing.
He looks surprised. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on his face.
I put my hip into him and make space. I go for the soft thing in his face with the heel of my hand, and I feel it give.
He makes a sound. I’m already turning to run. I’m screaming. I don’t know when I started.
Mateo is coming. I see him. He’s coming down the sidewalk at a dead run with the whole club behind him, Torque and Steel and Mess, Rook cutting across the strip. He’s the fastest thing I’ve ever seen.
He’s too far.
Cristo gets me from behind. His arm comes around my middle, and my feet leave the ground. I kick. I get his shin. I get my nails into the arm, and I feel skin come up under them. He doesn’t let go, because he’s learned.
He’s got blood running out of his nose into his mouth, and he’s not laughing now.
He throws me across the bike in front of him, belly-down over the tank with my head hanging off one side.
I try to scream again, but he’s on behind me with his arm locked across my back before I can get a knee under me.
“Ortiz!” He’s yelling it over my head, at the man coming down the sidewalk. “She walked right out to us, brother! Santo says thanks for keeping her warm!”
Mateo’s close enough now that I can see his face.
The bike goes.
It jumps off the curb so hard my teeth snap together. The shark comes out from under my arm where I’ve been holding him against me all this way, and I see him hit the road and roll.
I get my head up. I get my face turned over Cristo’s arm, and I look.
Mateo is standing in the middle of the road with his chest heaving and his arms at his sides. The whole club is behind him, and none of them are moving, because there’s nothing left to run at. He’s not looking at the bike. He’s looking down.
Then he bends and picks up the shark.
He stands there holding it. Blue, with its face on wrong, in both his hands, in the road.
He gets smaller. The strip turns and I lose him.
I’m going to be sick. I can taste it. I’m so scared my teeth are rattling. I’m looking at a man in a road holding a stuffed shark, and I know exactly what I just did to him.
I’m still looking back even when there’s nothing left to see.