Marie had hope I’d physically heal from my scars, but there’s no use in having it.
Then she made toast.
A woman who lost everything, making me toast because I was standing in her kitchen and she had to do something with her hands.
I get out of the shower and put on the clothes Lashes left for me.
They don't fit.
They’re four inches too long everywhere, and the shirt hangs off me like it's on a hook.
I lie down on top of the covers with my boots by the bed where I can reach them.
I'm not going to sleep.
I haven't slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch since I was twenty-two years old.
I don’t know if I ever can sleep soundly again.
I’m too damn worried about what could happen whenever I close my eyes.
Somehow, I end up sleeping for hours.
Food wakes me.
Not a noise, not the door, not the light going.
I come up flat on my back in the dark with my heart slamming and both hands already out looking for a wall, and there's a smell in this room that doesn't belong to it.
Chile and onion, and something underneath with cumin in it.
There's a strip of light under the door and voices past it.
A lot of them, somebody laughing, a chair going over on a hard floor, and four people yelling at once about it.
I lie there with my hand flat on my own chest and force myself to remember everything.
You're in Chihuahua.
The bed's against the east wall.
The door is nine feet away and the lock's on the inside and you're the one who turned it.
There's a window behind you with a screen and no bars on it.
Nobody in this building has ever hurt you.
Then I sit up in a strange bed with borrowed clothes and my hands going.
My hair is still damp from a shower I took hours ago.
I put my boots on, and I go find him.
The main room's got forty people in it, and every one of them sees me come through the door.
Not at once. The ones facing me first, then the ones who watch their faces change, and by the time I'm four steps in, a room that was roaring is a room that's talking.
Nobody stares. They all know.
