The men.
I remember the men.
Not their faces. Not yet. But their hands. Their shoes. The sounds they made. The weight of an adult body on a child's body. The specific physical sensations that I have no framework for because I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the things they did to me didn't have names in any language I knew and the pills took even the nameless memory of them and locked it behind a chemical wall that held for eleven years and is now collapsing.
I'm on the floor. Not the concrete floor. My bathroom floor. I made it to the bathroom before the vomiting started and I'm on my knees on the tile and my body is expelling everything it held for eleven years. Not food. Something deeper. A physical purge that comes from my stomach and my chest and the base of myspine, convulsive, violent, my body turning itself inside out to get the memories out, or to get them in, I can't tell which.
My finger is tapping the tile. Fast. Frantic. The same tile, the same finger, the same rhythm that started on a concrete floor in a room with no windows when a small girl needed to know she was still alive.
I am that girl. The tapping started with her. She started it and I kept it and I never knew why and now I know and the knowing is worse than the not knowing because the not knowing was a blank space and the knowing is a room with a door and hands and sounds I can't unhear.
The memories don't come in order. I feel everything before I see anything, and what I feel is old and huge and has been living in my body for sixteen years, curled in the dark, fed by pills, kept quiet.
I'm eight. I'm in a car. It's dark outside. A man's hand is over my mouth. I can't breathe through his fingers and I'm trying to scream, and the sound won't come because his palm is too tight. I can smell cigarettes on his skin. Not tobacco, not the warm sweet tobacco from a cigar. Cigarettes. Stale and bitter. The difference between those two smells is the difference between safety and this, and my body knew. My body always knew.
I'm ten. I'm in a different room. This one has a window, but the window has bars and the glass is painted over so the light comes through white and diffuse. There's a bed. A mattress on a metal frame. The sheets are gray. Everything is gray. I'm sitting on thebed with my knees pulled up and my finger is tapping the metal frame, one beat, two beats, three, and the door opens.
I'm twelve. I'm in a bathroom. Not my bathroom. A bathroom with a drain in the floor and a showerhead mounted to the wall and no curtain. I'm standing under cold water, and my body is covered in bruises, some old, some new, color on my skin that tells the history of the last four years in purple and yellow and green. My finger taps the wall. The tile is cold and wet and my finger slips, and I tap again, harder, and again, and the tapping is the only thing that's mine. Everything else belongs to them. My body, my name, my time, my sleep, my waking, my eating, my standing, my lying down. The tapping is the one thing they can't take because they don't notice it and they don't care about it and it's so small and so quiet that it exists beneath their attention.
I'm thirteen. I'm in an office. Fluorescent lights. A desk with papers. A man in a white coat. Not one of the men from the rooms. A different man. Older. Glasses. He's speaking English, not Italian, and the switch in language is disorienting after five years. He puts a needle in my arm and the world goes soft. Not dark. Soft. The edges of everything blur. The memories fold up. Not gone. Just folded, tucked away, placed in a drawer that I don't have a key to. He gives me a pill. Small. White. "For anxiety," he says. "Take one every morning."
The last thing I remember before the wall goes up is my finger tapping the arm of the chair I'm sitting in. One beat. Two beats. Fast. And then nothing. And then I'm thirteen and my name is Grace and my parents died in an accident and I live in Philadelphia with Paul and Linda Marino and I take a pill everymorning for anxiety and I don't remember anything before this moment.
Eleven years of nothing.
Until now.
I'm on my bathroom floor and my face is against the tile and I'm crying in Italian, full sentences, words I've known since I was born and forgot at thirteen and my mouth is giving them back to me one at a time.Papa. Casa. Aiutami. Non mi lasciare. Fa male. Fa male. Fa male.
It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.
I don't know how long I'm on the floor. An hour. Maybe two. The memories keep coming. Not all of them. Not every day of five years. Pieces. The room with no windows. The room with the painted window. The bathroom with the drain. The men, faceless, their hands and their weight. The smell of cigarettes. The cold of the floor. The tapping, always the tapping, the one constant across five years and eleven years and right now on my bathroom floor.
When the wave passes, I'm empty. Hollow. My body is wrung out, limp, lying on the tile in a t-shirt and underwear. My hair is wet from sweat and my face is wet from crying and the tile is wet from the vomiting and I'm lying in the wreckage of my own history.
I need him.
I reach for my phone. It's on the bed. I can see it from the bathroom floor through the open door, the screen dark on the pillow where I left it four hours ago. I crawl to it. My legs won't hold me. I pick it up and I find his name and I press call.
One ring.
"Grace." He was waiting.
"Come here."
I don't say please. I don't say I need you. I say come here the way you say it when there's no room for anything else. Two words. He taught me that. Two words can be enough.
"Two minutes," he says.
He hangs up. I count the seconds. At eighty-seven, there's a knock at my door. Not loud. Two knocks. I crawl to the door and unlock it from the floor, and he pushes it open and finds me on my hands and knees in the hallway of my apartment and he doesn't say anything. He picks me up. Both arms, all of me, the way you pick up something that weighs nothing, and he carries me to the bed, puts me down, lies down next to me, wraps his body around mine and holds.
I am being carried. Small arms around a neck. The smell of tobacco and something sweet.
The fragment from weeks ago. The one that had a person in it. Someone carrying me, someone whose neck I was holding. That was Renzo. My father. Carrying me somewhere safe, before they took me.
Carmelo is carrying me now. Not my father. Not the men from the rooms. A man I chose. A man who chose me first, months before I knew his name, and who killed the people who kept me in the dark, and who lied to me and fucked me and told me the truth while I sat on a bar with my pants around my ankle, and who came to my door in seconds when I said two words.
"I remember," I say against his chest.
