Chapter 5 #2
"That's what I need you to understand." Something's gone wrong in my voice, and I go straight through it. "My mother's in a bed with her arm in a cage, and I'm thinking about you, because I was terrified it would be you next."
"You expect me to understand that? That you pushed me away because you were afraid I’d be hurt?"
"They pulled her records." I look at her.
"That's all it took, Mila. Nobody looks at my mother and sees anything.
That's what I'm telling you. She's white.
She's white to every single person who's ever met her, and it didn't matter, because one man went to a courthouse and read a name and a location in Mexico off a certificate.
She's never said one word of Spanish in her life, and they put her in a ditch for it. "
"I know what they are."
"You don't know what they are." It comes out of me too loud and I force my voice down. My hands won't stay still, so I put them on my knees. "You know what they did to her. That's not the same as knowing what they'd have done to you."
"Finn—"
"Her grandmother was born in Cananea." I'm forward on the couch now, elbows on my knees.
"That's it. That's the whole crime. A woman nobody in that family ever met, born in a mining town in 1931.
And you're across the street with your mother's face and Bacani on the mailbox, and you're at every dinner at that house, and so am I. "
She's very still.
"They'd been in my house." My throat's shutting and I keep going through the hole in it.
"They'd been in my school. You think they didn't know who lived across the road?
You think there wasn't a picture of you in somebody's truck?
I worked those jobs for two years. Every man on those crews knew what my day-to-day looked like. "
"So you left."
"So I left."
"That's it," she says. "That's the answer."
"That's the truth, Camila."
She's looking at me and there's still nothing on her face, and I want to put my hand through the window.
"You could've told me," she says.
"No."
"You could have told me, Finn—"
"And then what?" I'm up. I don't remember standing.
"You come with me? You're twenty-two, you're in school, your mom's got that garden, your dad's got the shop with your name on the paperwork, and you'd have come.
That's the problem. You'd have come. And then it's the two of us in a motel outside Dayton for the rest of our lives, and they find us inside a year, because they found my father's first house inside a year and he had fucking Marshals protecting him! "
Her voice comes up for the first time since she’s been here and it goes through me like a nail. "Then let me decide that. It wasn’t your place to just take my choice away from me!"
I stop.
"I did it to keep you alive."
"I know why you did it." Her voice has gone somewhere it hasn't been since she arrived. "I know why, Finn. I've known for months. I sat at your mother's table, and she told me every bit of it, and I understood every word out of her mouth."
She stands up.
"And it didn't work," she says.
The roof's going in the wind, and I can hear my own blood.
"I was taken anyway." She's got her arms at her sides and she's not doing anything with them.
"That's what I need you to fucking understand.
You gave up ten years, you gave up me, you gave up your whole life to keep Ironwood off me.
And a man I've never seen before put a bag over my head outside a Fry's in Tucson, and he wasn't one of theirs, Finn.
Nobody called you. Nobody sent you a picture.
There was no message, Finn, because it wasn't about you. I was just a woman with groceries."
Something's happening in my chest and it's not a feeling, like it's a hand in there closing.
"It was in the middle of the day and I was carrying groceries."
"Mila—"
"You blew up my whole life to stop something that might not have been coming." She's shaking. "And then it came anyway, from somewhere else. It took nine years off me, and the whole time I was down there I thought—"
She stops.
"What?" I say.
"No."
"What did you think?"
Her jaw goes sideways and she turns her head away. "I thought you'd come for me."
The wind. The roof. My own breathing, too loud in a cold room.
"I thought you'd come." Her voice is coming apart in the middle and she walks straight through the pieces of it.
"That's how stupid I was. Year one, I thought about it every day.
Year two, most days. I had a whole picture of it in my mind.
I had the door and everything, I had what you'd be wearing.
" Her hand comes up and drops. "And then, in year three, I worked it out that you didn't know I was gone.
Nobody told you. Nobody could. And that was worse, Finn.
You have no idea. That was so much worse than you not coming. "
She turns around.
Her face is wet, and she's not doing one thing about it, and she's looking straight at me.
"If you'd known and you didn't come, I could've hated you." Her chin's going, and she doesn't stop it. "I wanted to hate you. I worked at it. But you were just gone, and you were gone for me, and so I couldn't even have that."
I'm across the room.
I don't decide to.
I'm three feet away with my hands half up and she doesn't move, doesn't step back, doesn't do one thing except look at me, and we're two people breathing at each other in a room cold enough to see it.
"Mila."
"Don't."
"I'm sorry." There's nothing left in me. "I'm sorry, I'm—it doesn't—"
"I know it doesn't."
Her hand comes up.
It lands flat on my chest and stops me dead.
Her hand's so small. She's got it flat on my sternum, and I can feel every finger of it through my shirt. It’s ice cold, and it's shaking, her whole arm's going, and she's staring at her own hand like it belongs to somebody else.
My heart's going into her palm and she can feel it. She has to know she can feel it.
"You still smell the same," she says.
I couldn't answer that if you paid me.
Her hand slides. Two inches. Three.
Up toward my collarbone, and her fingers catch on the chain and stop there, hooked in it, and her breath's coming apart, and mine's gone somewhere else entirely.
There's four inches between us, and I don't know which one of us took them.
She looks up.
And it's her. Under all of it, it's her, and her mouth's right there, and her hand's in my chain, and I lean in.
She's already moving.
Up on her toes, her other hand coming up, and I've got a fistful of her jacket.
Her mouth is a half-inch off mine, and I can taste the whiskey in her breath.
She stops.
Dead stop. Half an inch. Two full seconds where neither of us moves, and I can feel her breathing on my mouth.
Then she takes her hand off my chest.
She takes it off like it burned her and pulls it against her own body with the other one, and she steps back and hits the couch with the backs of her legs and grabs the arm of it.
"No," she says.
"Mila—"
"No." She's got both arms wrapped around herself, she's shaking her head, and she won't look at me. "No, no, no."
"Okay. Okay."
"You don't get that." Her voice cracks straight down the middle of it. "You don't get—I've had one thing. In nine years. One thing was mine, and it's that nobody has had one piece of me I didn't hand over myself, and I almost gave it away in a sunroom because you smell the same."
"Mila."
"Get out."
"Mila—"
"Get out, Finn." She's looking at the floor with her arms locked around her ribs. "Please. Please get out."
I don't move.
Three feet. That's what's between us.
There's three feet of concrete slab in front of me and I've still got her jacket balled in my fist.
I let go of it.
Her hands are shaking so hard she's got them clamped under her arms, and she's got her chin down.
She won't look at me and she isn’t going to look at me.
Every part of me is screaming to put my arms around her.
She'd let me. She might fight me at first, but she would.
I know it standing here.
Ten years ago, I decided something for her, and it cost her everything.
I'm not doing it twice.
"Okay," I say.
She doesn't answer.
I go out into the courtyard.
It’s empty, the cold's got hold of my hands, and I stand in it anyway.
I can see her through the glass in the sunroom, sitting back down on that couch with her arms still around herself, and she doesn't turn the heater on, and she doesn't come inside.
I don't go back.
I end up by the garage door with the dog bowl at my feet, and there's already a skin of ice on it, and it isn't even ten o'clock.
I break it with my thumb.
Fuck, Mila.
How am I supposed to fix this?