Chapter 16 #2
"You lie in the dark relieved that it's her and not you.
And then you go on living inside a body that felt that.
" My eyes have gone hot and full and I let them, I don't wipe them, I keep going.
"That's the part nobody wants to hear about.
Everybody wants the part where we held each other up.
And we did, we did that too. But there were nights I heard that door stop somewhere else on the hall and I said thank you.
Out loud. In the dark. To nothing." My voice breaks, and I keep talking through the break.
"I said thank you while a girl I loved was on the other side of a wall having the worst night of her life.
I have to carry that. She's still down there, and I got to leave, and I said thank you. "
Nobody at that table is moving.
"You hear whatever happens next. It goes on a long time or it doesn't. Sometimes there's talking, and the talking's worse than anything, because you can hear how comfortable they are.
Men who are worried about getting caught don't chat.
" I push through it. "And afterward, you knock.
Two on the wall means are you alive. One back means yes.
So you lie there in the dark waiting on one knock, and if it doesn't come, if there's nothing on the other side of that wall, you keep going anyway, because there's not one thing you can do about it from eleven feet underground. "
Somebody breathes out hard. I don't look to see who.
"That's the sound. Every night for years. And it's still going on tonight, right now, while we sit in a warm room with the door shut and Ruby making lunch."
"Jesus Christ," Boulder says, low.
"Now here's the part that's your business," I say, "because you're right, Zorro. You're not wrong, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you that you are. They're not yours. Not your blood, no claim on this club, and nobody at this table owes them a single thing."
Zorro looks up at me.
"But I do."
The room's dead silent.
"The night I got out, I got out through the client building, because they'd brought me up for a whipping and left me above ground afterward.
That's the only reason I'm breathing. And on my way past that hallway, bleeding, with the ledger in my shirt and maybe ninety seconds before somebody came looking—"
My voice goes and I have to stand there and get it back.
"I stopped."
Nobody moves.
"I could've run. I want everybody in this room to understand that I was ninety seconds from the fence and I stopped, and I've asked myself a thousand times since whether that was brave or whether it was the stupidest thing I've ever done, because if they'd caught me at that door I'd have died in the dirt and nobody would ever have known those women existed.
" I press my palms flat on the chair back.
"I stopped, and I put my hand on the eighth door on the left, and I knocked twice.
And she knocked back. One knock. She was alive. "
I look at Amara.
"And I said the only thing I had time to say. Volveré. I'll come back."
Nobody says anything.
"I've had nine months of freedom, and I haven't had one single night where I didn't hear myself say it.
It's the last thing out of my head before I sleep and the first thing in it when I wake up in a warm bed in this building.
Every morning I lie there and think about how many nights it's been since I said it.
Two hundred and eighty-one." My whole face is wet now.
"That's this morning's number. I'll have a new one tomorrow.
I've had a new one every day since I crawled out of that place, and every single one of them is a day she woke up and I didn't come. "
The shaking's arrived in my hands and I put them behind my back.
"I walked across a desert. I sat in Marie Kincaid's kitchen for months doing nothing, because I couldn't do it alone.
I still can't." My voice is in pieces and I don't care anymore.
"That's why I'm standing in a room I've got no business standing in, in front of men who don't owe me anything.
I'm not asking you to care about eleven strangers.
You're right that you don't have to. I'm asking you to help me keep my word. "
I have to get the last of it out fast or I won't get it out.
"Because I gave it. And it's the last thing I own.
They took my parents, they took my body, and they took nine years.
They took every single thing I ever wanted for myself, and they didn't get that.
That one's mine. It's the only thing I walked out of there with besides a notebook, and if I don't keep it, then they got all of it after all. "
Silence.
Then Lashes stands up beside me. "Zorro."
His face changes before she says anything else. "Yes, ma'am."
"You said we should go after mine first."
"I did."
"Then say the rest of it out loud, because I don't think you heard yourself." Lashes's voice is perfectly level. "Say who I was, the night Sally Bernard sold me out of that lot."
Zorro doesn't answer.
"I'll say it. I wasn't anybody's ol' lady.
I wasn't patched. I wasn't kin to one man at this table by blood.
I was a prospect who did the dishes." She hasn't raised her voice an inch.
"I was somebody else's problem. And I sat in a room in Colombia for months doing the same counting she just described to you, and every night I told myself the same lie, which is that somebody was coming. "
She lets it sit.
"And somebody did. Brick came. Not because I was his blood, and not because I had a claim on this club.
He came because I was a person, and he decided that was enough.
" She looks around the table. "If this club had counted the way you're counting today, I'd still be down there.
I'd have had my baby in a room with a bucket in it.
Or I'd be dead, which is what most of us end up, so let's be honest about the odds. "
"That's not fair," Zorro says. It comes out rough.
"It's completely fair. It's only uncomfortable." Lashes doesn't blink. "You're a good man doing your job, and I'd be dead if this club had done that job the way you're arguing for it. I'm not asking you to pick between those. I'm asking you to hold both of them and vote anyway."
Zorro looks at her a long moment.
"I hear you," he says. "I'm still voting no."
"I know." Lashes sits down. "I love you anyway. But no woman should ever suffer the way I suffered, and I'm never going to be quiet about that, and if this club won't go pull eleven women out of the ground, then I don't know what the patch is for."
Her hand finds mine down between the two chairs and grips it hard, and I grip back, and neither of us looks at the other one.
Amara closes the folder.
"Is that it?," she says. "Anything else gets said now, because after this it's a vote, it's binding, and nobody brings it back up in the kitchen."
Nobody speaks.
"All right." She sits back. "The proposal is that this charter, in partnership with the Vegas charter, executes an operation on the property known as La Nada in Cochise County, Arizona, to extract eleven women held there. Timeline to be set. Command shared between myself and Damon."
She looks down the table.
"Razor."
"Yes."
"Python."
Python's quiet a second. "Yes. With the head count noted."
"Noted. Boulder."
"Yes."
"Brick."
"Yes."
"Doom."
"Yes." One word. It's the only one he's said in this entire meeting.
"Axel."
Axel's got his arms crossed. He looks at Zorro, then at Lashes, then down at the wood.
"No," he says. "Same reason as Zorro. I've got a kid too."
Something goes out of me at that and I keep my face still. I've had a lifetime of practice keeping my face still.
"Noted. Zorro."
"No." He says it clean, no hedging, a man voting his conscience in front of a room that's already gone the other way. "And for the record, if it goes, I'll do whatever I'm told and I'll do it right. But no."
Amara nods once.
"Four yes, two no." Her eyes flick to the foot of the table, to Finn, who hasn't said a word since he said my name. "And a prospect who doesn't vote and knows it. That's one short of what I want before I put men over an international border."
My stomach goes to water and my hands go cold on the chair back.
One short.
Two hundred and eighty-one nights, and a warm room, and a table full of good men, and it comes down one short.
"So it comes to me," Amara says.
She doesn't make a speech about it.
I've sat in enough rooms with enough men in charge to know what it looks like when somebody's about to turn a decision into a performance.
Amara doesn't do it. She sits there maybe five seconds with her hands flat on the folder. Then she looks up.
"Yes," she says. "We go."
Nobody cheers.
And I don't make a sound either.
I stand against the wall behind the president of a motorcycle club with my hands behind my back and my face wrecked.
The only thing that happens in me is that a wire I've been holding taut for two hundred and eighty-one days goes slack all at once,
My legs nearly go with it, and I lock my knees and stay standing because I'm not going down in this room.
Somebody's coming.
That's what I keep thinking, standing there.
That's what she's been telling herself behind that door every night, the way Lashes told it to herself in Colombia, and every night it was a lie, and in nine days it stops being one.