Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Mila
There are five of us in the truck and they've put me in the middle of the back seat, which is the worst place to sit if something happens and the only place left, and I'm working on being okay with it.
Nova's driving. Rosa's got shotgun with her boots on the dash.
Ruby and Lashes are on either side of me, Hope's in a car seat wedged in the way back with a diaper bag the size of a body.
And there's a Chevy with two of the guys in it forty feet behind us the whole way into the city, because Amara doesn't let women off the property alone and hasn't since before I got here.
"Okay, ground rules." Nova catches my eye in the mirror. "We're not buying anything practical. Ruby already tried to make it about dish towels. It is not about dish towels."
"I need dish towels," Ruby says.
"You have a husband and a paycheck, buy dish towels on your own time." Nova takes the exit. "Today we look at things we don't need, and we make Mila try on something that isn't owned by Lashes'."
"Hey," Lashes says.
"Your clothes are great. They're four sizes too big for her and she looks like a kid in her dad's shirt." Nova glances back. "No offense."
"None taken," I say.
It's the truth.
Ten days in Lashes's clothes, the shirt hanging off me, the jeans rolled six times at the ankle, and I've stopped caring what I look like so completely that I almost can't understand what we're driving to a shopping center to fix.
Almost.
There's a part of me, small and buried and nine years old, that heard we’re trying on clothes with women who I think are my friends, and got excited.
* * *
The mall's got a fountain, a food court, and too many people. I hate it for the first ten minutes.
Nobody warns you about crowds after. It isn't fear, not exactly.
A crowd is two hundred people you can't track at once and two hundred sets of hands you can't see, and my whole body lights up faster than I can answer it.
I'm through the doors with my back already against a support pillar before I've decided to move.
Lashes appears at my shoulder.
She doesn't say a word about it. She stands next to me, half a step back, so there's a wall on one side and her on the other.
She reads a store directory she isn't reading until my breathing comes down. "Better?"
"Yeah."
"Malls are a lot. It gets easier over time." She hooks her arm through mine, light enough that I can pull out of it, and I don't. "Come on. Nova's already gone feral in a shoe store."
It does get easier. Not all the way. But by the second store, my back's come off the walls, and I'm standing in the open like a person.
By the third I've picked something up off a rack to look at it, a scarf I don't want, and put it back, and the small ordinary motion of it—wanting nothing, buying nothing, just touching a thing because it's soft—undoes something in me I didn't know was still knotted.
Rosa buys sunglasses she doesn't need and wears them inside.
Nova tries on a hat that's wrong for her and makes us all vote on it and overrules the vote.
Ruby carries Hope when Lashes's arms give out and hums to her, low, in Spanish, and Hope watches her mouth move.
Nobody asks me anything. Nobody makes me the center of it.
They fold me into a normal afternoon and let me stand in it, and for a couple of hours I'm not a woman who got out of a hole in the ground.
I'm just the quiet one in a group of women at a mall, and nobody looking at us would know the difference, and I keep catching myself almost forgetting.
* * *
We're sharing a plate of something fried in the food court, and Rosa's arguing with Nova about a purse.
Ruby's got a lemonade she keeps not drinking, turning the straw around and around. Then she says it, low, only for the table.
"I'm pregnant."
Nova drops the purse mid-sentence. "Ruby."
"About nine weeks." She's gone pink to the ears. "I haven't told Zorro. I'm telling him this weekend, I've got a whole plan, so nobody breathe a word, I mean it, Nova, I can see you about to come apart—"
"I'm not going to come apart."
"You're the color of a stop sign."
"I'm happy." Nova's got both hands clamped over her mouth. "Look how normal I'm being about this. Look at me."
Lashes has Hope up on her shoulder and she's grinning around the baby's head. "Leo's getting a sibling."
"Leo's going to be furious," Ruby says. "That boy does not share."
They're laughing, all of them, warm and low, and Ruby's pink and lit up and turning her lemonade straw, and there's a whole life sitting out in front of her that she gets to walk into.
A second baby. A husband she's planning a surprise for. And it comes up in me before I can head it off.
It isn't jealousy. I wish it were. Jealousy would be simpler.
My body starts counting.
It does that on its own now, without me—how many of mine, how many they took, and Ruby gets to sit in a food court and tell her news to a table full of women who love her.
Lashes' hand finds my knee underneath it.
She doesn't look at me. She keeps grinning at Ruby, and she squeezes once, hard, and lets go.
I get my breath back on my own.
"Congratulations," I tell Ruby, and I mean it.
She smiles at me like she knows exactly what those four syllables took and isn't going to make me say any more.
After we finish eating, we head into a smaller sort of boutique in the mall.
Nova finds the dress.
Dark green, simple, cut narrow for a body like mine, and she holds it against me in the middle of the store with her head tipped to one side.
"This one. You're trying it."
"Nova—"
"You don't have to buy it. You don't have to like it. Four seconds so I can see if I'm right, and I'm always right, and then you can go back to your dad's shirt." She's already steering me to the back. "Lashes, referee. She won't come out for just me."
"I trust you," I say.
"You trust me a normal amount for a week. Get in there."
The fitting room's small and there's a mirror, and I keep my back to it out of nine years of habit.
I get Lashes' shirt off and the dress over my head, and it slides down and settles, and it fits—it sits on my shoulders the way clothes used to fit before, like it was made to, and I turn to look before I remember why I don't.
I remember when I see Lashes' face in the glass behind me.
The dress dips in the back. Not far, but far enough.
And there it is, the whole of me laid out in the mirror—the ropes of scar tissue and the places that healed crooked.
The ones that got split open again before they could close at all, ten years of a man with a strap.
The first time I've looked at it head-on since Marie's bathroom. I look at it in a mall fitting room with two women behind me.
Nobody says anything for a second.
Then Nova steps in.
She's a nurse. I'd forgotten she's a nurse until right now, because she looks at my back the way a nurse looks.
Not away, not wincing, her eyes tracking it steady and clinical, taking it in without making a show of taking it in.
"Okay." Her voice is flat and easy. "The top one, running up under your shoulder blade. Does it pull when you reach overhead?"
I blink at her in the mirror. "Sometimes."
"Yeah. That one healed down into the muscle.
There's work we can do on it—not to make it vanish, I won't lie to you about that, but to get the range back so it quits catching.
" She meets my eyes in the glass like we're discussing a bad ankle.
"Whenever you want. No rush. It's not going anywhere and neither am I. "
That's all of it.
She doesn't tell me I'm brave.
She doesn't tell me it's not that bad, because it is that bad.
She's a nurse and she won't insult me by pretending. She looks at the worst part of my body like it's a problem with a fix, and then she looks back up at my face.
Lashes is leaning in the doorway.
She's pulled her own collar to the side without a word, and there's a scar across her collarbone I hadn't seen before, thick and old. She lets me see it. She doesn't say anything about it. She pulls the collar back.
"Dress is stupid good on you," she says. "Nova was right. Don't tell her."
"Heard it," Nova says.
"I meant you to."
I look at myself in the mirror.
Green dress, scarred back, my mother's cheekbones and my father's chin, forty pounds lighter than I should be and standing up straight for the first time I can call to mind.
"I'm buying it," I say.
But they don’t let me.
Nova takes it upon herself to get me the dress, even though I did argue quite a bit with her.
Lashes and Ruby told me to just let her do it. And, I smile to myself, because this is what sisterhood should feel like.
We're back at the club a little after four and the good part of the day holds all the way to the gate.
Then Finn's in the courtyard waiting, and I know before the truck stops.
I read it off his body, the way I read everything now.
Phone in his hand, shoulders sitting wrong, and he isn't watching the truck, he's watching the gravel, and when I climb out he comes straight at me and doesn't slow.
"My mother called."
I've got the dress in a bag on my arm and I set it down on the ground.
"Somebody's been on her street. A car she doesn't know, twice this week, parked and sitting.
" His voice comes flat and fast. "A call to her landline yesterday, nobody there when she picked up.
And this morning a man knocked with a clipboard, said he was running a survey, and he had her name wrong.
He called her by a name she hasn't used since before I was born.
Her maiden name. The one off the certificate. "
The certificate.
The one with a town in Mexico written in the corner of it.
"Finn."
"I know."
"They don't do all that unless—"
"I know." He's already turning for the office. "Come with me. I need Amara, and I need you, and I need it now, because nobody sits on a street for a week and then knocks. They knock when they've already made up their minds."
Amara doesn't lose a second.
She's out of her chair before Finn finishes, phone in her hand, saying names into it I don't know.
Finn stands in the middle of her office, opening and closing his hands at his sides, and I've never seen him like this.
I've seen him wrecked. I've seen him go dead silent.
I’ve never once seen him afraid, and it's all pointed at her, at a woman two thousand miles north in a house on a street with a car parked outside it.
"She flies out of Tucson," Amara's saying.
"Not Phoenix. Tucson's closer, it's smaller, I've got a man who can meet her there.
One bag. Passport and nothing that has to be mailed or forwarded, nothing that leaves a trail.
She tells no neighbor. She doesn't stop the mail. " She looks at Finn. "She got money?"
"I'll send it tonight."
"Send it to my man, not to her. Her account's a trail too." She's writing as she talks. "If she moves tonight, she's here in two days. Can she move tonight?"
Finn's already got the phone up.
"Mom." His voice splits on the word and he hauls it back level. "Mom, listen to me. I need you to do something, and I need you not to argue with me about it. Okay? I need you to pack a bag."
I stand against the wall and I watch him.
I watch him tell his mother to walk out of her house.
To leave the town she's lived in since the divorce and the house she keeps spotless, and the whole quiet life she built back up out of the one Ironwood already burned down.
He emphasizes to do it tonight, in the dark, without telling one living soul, because her son says she has to.
He's standing in his president's office with tears standing on his face, deciding his mother's entire life inside a phone call, lifting the choice clean out of her hands, and he's doing it because he loves her and because they're already coming and because there's no time.
I know precisely what it's taking out of him. I know exactly why. And I can't get angry.
That's what I can't get around, flat against that wall.
Ten years ago he did this to me.
He decided.
He took my whole life in his two hands and made the call without asking, to keep me breathing, and I have hated him for it every day since.
Now I'm watching him do it again, to another woman he loves, for the same reason.
And it's the right call. It might be the only one there is.
If he doesn't decide for her, she dies in that house the way my mother died in ours, on the floor, over an address.
So which was it, with me?
I stand against the wall and watch Finn save his mother the only way he's got, and for the first time in ten years, I can't find the line anymore between what he did to me and what love looks like when the men coming through the door don't care one bit what you agreed to.
"She's packing," Finn says, and lowers the phone, and his hand won't hold still. "She's packing."
He looks at me.
And I've got nothing to give him, because everything I've been certain of for ten years just slid out from under my feet.