Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mila
The chapel door's been shut for two hours, and I've been watching it the entire time.
I'm on the bench by the dead fire pit where I can see it across the courtyard, and there's a blanket on my shoulders somebody put there that I didn't ask for and haven't taken off.
There are two women out here, and they won't leave me alone. I didn't ask them to stay either.
The one with the baby is Lashes.
The other one showed up an hour ago with a thermos and a leather folio and sat down across from me like we'd been doing this for years, said her name was Imani, and then didn't say much of anything after, which is how I knew I could stand her.
"They can't throw him out," Lashes says. "For the record. I know that's what you're sitting here waiting to find out."
"I'm not." I keep my eyes on the yard.
"You've looked at that door forty times."
"I'm watching the yard." I look at the yard, hard, to prove it, and the door's right there at the edge of it, and I look at that too.
"You're watching the door." She shifts Hope higher on her shoulder. "It's fine. I'd be watching it too."
I've got the blanket bunched in both fists in my lap, and I make myself open my hands.
Imani pours something out of the thermos into a metal cup and slides it across the little table without asking if I want it, the way they all do here.
Nobody's asked me if I wanted a single thing since I got here.
They put it in front of me and let me decide, and my body doesn't know what to do with being handed something it can refuse.
It's coffee with cinnamon in it. Maybe piloncillo.
"My father taught me to read a bad room before I could read words.
" Imani's looking at the folio, not at me.
"Who's about to move. Who's already decided.
Who's talking to fill the air because they're scared.
" She turns a page that has nothing to do with any of this.
"That door's going to open and he's going to walk out still wearing that cut, and he's going to look like hell, and none of it will tell you what you actually want to know. "
"And what's that?"
"Whether it was worth it to him." She looks up. "Coming apart in front of his whole club to say your name."
I drink the coffee so my mouth's got something to do besides answer her.
The door opens.
He comes out first, ahead of all of them, and stops in the courtyard like he forgot how the light works.
Even from here it's plain.
He's a big man standing like a smaller one, shoulders rolled down, chin dropped, and he drags the flat of his hand down his face the way a man does when he doesn't want to be seen doing it.
Then he turns and looks straight at the fire pit.
Straight at me.
Two hours in that room, and I don't know one word of what he said.
The first thing he does with his body when he comes out of it is point it at me.
My legs want to stand.
That's the truth and I hate it.
My weight's already come forward onto my feet before I know I've done it, the blanket sliding off one shoulder, and I catch myself half up off the bench, and I put myself back down on it hard enough that the stone bites through my jeans.
I’ve spent nine years being the only thing that decides where my body goes, and I'm not handing that back across a courtyard over a look on a man's face.
He doesn't come to me either.
He holds it a second. Then he nods, small, like he's agreeing with something I didn't say, and turns for the garage, and the last of him I see is his hand gone up to the back of his own neck like he's holding his head onto his body.
The wanting to go after him doesn't stop when he's out of sight. It sits in my legs and aches.
"Okay," Lashes says, low. "He's not going to push it. Good."
"How is that good?"
"Because you don't want to be pushed. And he knows it." She looks at me over Hope's head. “Most men would've already crossed the yard. He didn't."
Imani closes the folio.
"Bring the notebook," she says. "It's too cold out here to think straight."
We head inside and spread it out on a table in the main room.
The composition book in the middle.
Imani's got a legal pad, mechanical pencil, and reading glasses I didn't know she wore, and a club laptop open beside her.
Lashes sits across from me with Hope asleep in a car seat on the bench.
I've read this book a hundred times. I know it better than my own hands, better than anything I own, because for a while it was the only thing I owned.
"Eleven sets of initials," I say. "They come back. Everybody else comes once or twice and never again, but these eleven keep coming. I've got dates for all of them, and I've got the months where the same one shows up twice."
"Show me your worst one." Imani doesn't look up. "The one that's there the most."
"WT." I go to the pages without looking, my thumb finds them on its own. "WT's on almost every page. Goes back the furthest, comes the most, and there's a note next to it I could never crack. It says comp half the time. Like it's short for something and they got lazy about writing it out."
Imani stops writing.
She goes still, pencil lifted off the page, and then she prints four letters on the legal pad and turns it so I can see.
She's written comp.
"That's not short for a name." She takes her glasses off. "It's an accounting word. Comped. Complimentary. It means WT doesn't pay."
Somebody's got a game on across the room. A chair drags in the kitchen. None of it reaches me.
"Everybody pays." My voice comes out too flat and I don't fix it. "That's the whole business. I heard them turn men away over money. I heard men beg on the other side of a wall and get told no."
"Everybody pays except the man who owns it." Imani sets the pencil down and folds her hands. "Or the man it's being run for. You don't comp a customer eleven years running, Mila. You comp the boss."
I look at the book.
Eight fucking months.
For eight months I carried this thing against my chest across a border and slept with it under my pillow in a spare room.
I read WT off these pages in the dark more times than I can count, and every single time I read a man who came a lot.
A regular. A face I'd have known. Never once the man who owns the place. I read it as a woman who'd been inside it. Imani read it as a book.
My face is hot and my hands have gone cold on the table and I put them in my lap where nobody can watch them.
"There's more." Imani's fully in it now, glasses back down her nose, going page by page.
"This isn't a guest list. It's a billing record.
Look at the figures—none of them are round.
Nobody hands cash across a desk in a bunker and it comes to four hundred and eighty-five dollars even.
These were invoiced. Somebody kept books. "
"So?"
"So a book like this doesn't live by itself.
" She looks up at me over the rims. "You don't keep a billing ledger for a business that has no names in it.
This is the working copy. The shorthand.
The thing the man at the desk scratches in during the night.
The clean set—the one with WT spelled all the way out, with a bank behind it—that's kept somewhere else. "
The shorthand copy.
Eight months I hauled the wrong book across a desert and told myself it was everything I had.
"You didn't grab the wrong one." Imani's reading my face, which nobody does, only Lashes does that.
"You grabbed the one that was open on the desk while a man was writing in it.
That's not a mistake, that's evidence. Somebody's keeping a clean set, and wherever it is, I can guarantee it's locked away safely. "
There's a heat coming up the back of my throat and a lift under my ribs like the floor of an elevator.
I know exactly what it is and I don't want it, because the last time I let it in, I was standing with my palm flat on the eighth door on the left, and it nearly got me killed.
Hope isn’t something I can afford to carry into a desert. But it's in me anyway, warm and terrible, and I sit with it and let it stay.
This book was a dead weight I dragged across a border for nothing. Now it's got a thread coming off it. And a thread runs to something.
* * *
We work until Hope wakes up.
She goes from asleep to outraged in one breath, the way she does, and Lashes has her up on a shoulder and swaying before I've turned my head all the way.
"She's hungry." Lashes is already rising. "I'll take her out, you two keep at it—"
"Don't."
It's out of me before I decide to let it out.
Lashes stops halfway up.
Hope's turning her face into her neck and fussing, and Imani's gone still across the table.
I've got one hand coming up off my lap and half-reaching toward a baby I've got no business reaching for.
"Don't take her out." I make myself lower my hand. "Not on my account."
"Mila." She says it carefully. "I wasn't going to make it a—"
"You were." My throat's doing something and I talk through it. "You've been doing it since I got here. You catch my eye across a room and you look away. You just stood up to carry her out because I'm sitting here, and I know why, and I need you to quit it."
The room's loud on every side and none of it comes near this table.
"I know what happened to you." Lashes lowers back down onto the bench, Hope on her shoulder, her hand spread flat on the baby's back. "I heard it in the office. I wasn't going to sit here and wave her at you."
"She's not being waved at me. She's being a baby."
"Mila—"
"I lost—"
And it comes up out of me with edges on it and I can't get in front of it.
My eyes go hot and full so fast the room smears, and my breath catches high in my chest. I press the heel of my hand under my ribs like I can hold it down from the outside.
"I don't know how many. That's the piece I can't get past. I don't even get the number. They didn't let me keep one of them and they didn't let me keep count.
I've spent years not letting myself think about a single one, because thinking about them was the one thing down there that would've actually finished me."
Hope's stopped fussing. She's breathing against her mother's neck.
"And you kept yours," I say.
Lashes doesn't move.
"You were in the same kind of dark I was, and you got out, and you kept her.
" The tears are running now and I let them run, I don't wipe them, I keep my eyes on her.
"And I've been across a table from you making myself not look at her, because I didn't know if I could look at her and stay in one piece.
And I'm done. I looked at eleven doors in a hallway and I walked past every one of them. I can look at one sleeping baby."
Nobody says anything.
Then Lashes stands, comes around the table, and does the last thing I'd have guessed. She holds Hope out to me.
"Then hold her." Her voice isn't careful anymore. "You don't have to. But she won't break and neither will you, and I think you've had a bellyful of people deciding what you can carry."
I look at the baby.
A few months old, warm, a crease at her wrist where the fat folds over, and she smells like milk and something clean underneath it.
I take her.
She's heavier than she looks. They always are.
She turns her face into my collarbone, makes a small sound, and goes still against me, and I sit in the main room of a motorcycle club in a country I've never lived in, with a sleeping baby on my chest and a notebook full of the men who did this to both of us open on the table.
And I don't come apart.
I keep waiting for it and it doesn't come. I hold a baby and I stay in one piece.
"There it is," Lashes says, and sits back down, picks the pencil up off Imani's pad, and gets back to the book like nothing on earth just happened.