She doesn't say a word.
She stands there with her arms crossed, her back turned, and she lets me have it, and surprisingly, she doesn't leave.
When I can control myself and get upright, I drag my sleeve across my face, and she's exactly where she was.
"There's a shower in the room they gave you," she says. "Water takes a minute to get hot and then it getshot. Don't stand under it while you're waiting."
"Okay."
"And I brought you clothes." She turns around. "They won't fit. I'm four inches taller than you and I had a baby four monthsago, so I'm carrying it in places you're not, and I want you to know I'm aware of that. I'm not being stupid about it. It's clothes or it's what you've got on, and what you've got on smells like crap."
That's true.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay." She nods once. "Try to get some sleep after."
"I don't sleep."
"Yeah, you do." She picks the mug up off the fire pit and puts it back in my hands. "Everybody thinks they don't. There's a lock on the inside of that door. Zorro put it on for you, so you’d feel more comfortable. We’re not blind to what you’ve been through, and some of us, even the Prez, have been captive and raped at some point in her life. Just… know you’re safe here, Mila."
She starts for the clubhouse.
"Lashes."
She stops.
I don't have anything. I don't know why I said it.
There's a mug in my hands, my face is ruined, and there's a woman standing in the gravel waiting on me, and I've got nothing at all.
"Yeah," she says. "I know."
Then she goes.
* * *
The water takes a minute to get warm, and then it gets blood-curdling hot.
I stand under it with my forehead on the tile and let it run down my back.
The scar tissue doesn't feel it the way the rest of me does. It never does.
There's a whole map of me back there that's gone silent, and the live parts around it do all the reporting.
So what I get is a hot band across the top of my shoulders and nothing underneath.
I don't look.
There's a mirror in here, and I keep my back to it the whole time.
Marie had a full-length one in her bathroom.
She took it down within the first week I was there, never said why, and never put it back.
One night I came out, and she was at her kitchen table in the middle of the night with a cigarette she wasn't smoking.
She had told me how she thought the scars would fade, how they’d heal. I had to tell her they’d been split open so many times again and again that they never would.
