Page 48
She takes that in, but she doesn’t throw anything at me.
Progress.
“Are you finished eating?” I ask her.
She nods. “Look, I know I should eat more, but I can only eat so much right now.”
“You did well,” I tell her. “Did they starve you?”
She shrugs. “They offered me food, but they drugged it. So I didn’t trust it.”
It takes a spine of steel to refuse food when you’re starving.
I nod. Those fuckers will pay.
“We'll do small, frequent meals.” I stand. “Now let's get you cleaned up and dressed. I've got something to show you.”
“What do you mean, let's?”
“I'm not going to wait outside the bathroom, and I'm not going to leave you in there alone.” I pause. “Anyway, I've already seen all of you, haven't I?”
She doesn't blush very often, but it feels like a win when she does.
”Right now, you're going to get dressed and ready. We have to move out of this room.”
“Did they find us?”
“I don’t think so. If they knew where we were, we'd already be surrounded.”
She showers quickly and efficiently. She washes her entire body, and I remember exactly what she's washing off.
I take my time looking. I'm going to look. I'm a fucking man, and she’s mine.
But I won't touch her without permission, so I hold the thick white towel open for her when she's done and keep my fucking hands to myself.
“Thank you,” she says. “We’re on our way to where, exactly?”
“Here in downtown Boston.”
She nods. “I thought maybe. It's been a long time since I've been here. My mom took me to see the Swan Boats when I was little.”
“Swan Boats?”
She nods as she dresses in leggings and a sweatshirt from one of the bags I had brought in. She looks younger in them. More like herself, maybe, or at least more like the girl in the photographs.
“They’re these little boats in downtown Boston that seat a few people at a time. They take you by these little nests of swans and their young.”
She says it almost wistfully.
“Your mother still here?”
She doesn’t meet my eyes when she shakes her head. “No.”
“What happened to her?”
“Heart attack,” she says quietly. “She had a condition.” She still doesn’t look at me when she sighs. “My father was an asshole to her.”
I think about my own mother, probably hard at work on a dinner I won’t get to eat, who kept letters from a son she wasn't allowed to visit.
