Until the Day I Die(23)

“Erin Gaines, trois,” Grigore says.

“Hello, Erin,” she says. “Ready to shower?” She pulls a bundle from under the desk, and Grigore scoops it up.

“This way,” he says.

I follow him down another hall that ends in another frosted glass door. He hands me the bundle and takes my purse.

“This is your regulation Hidden Sands clothing. After undressing, leave your clothes in the bins. The staff will launder and hold them until the day of your release.” He unzips my duffel, allowing me to pull out a fresh set of underwear, then zips it back. “Several more outfits are in your room, where I’ll leave your purse. I’ll be back for you in fifteen minutes.”

My hair cascades down my back and, startled, I turn. Grigore is holding my scrunchie, and I can’t help but stare at him. The last person who touched my hair was Ben. On my front porch when we were kissing. And I can still feel the pressure of his fingers. Why does that particular gesture feel so invasive? So intimate?

“No hair ties,” Grigore says simply. “Antonia asks her clients to wear their hair natural.”

I shake my head to clear the memory and snort. “Okay. For argument’s sake, we’ll call this natural.”

His gaze doesn’t waver. “It’s lovely,” he says in a gentle voice, which makes me feel about a hundred different ways I don’t want to feel. Foolish. Needy.

Alone.

“It’s a psychological tactic, right?” I say. “To make us feel vulnerable and uncomfortable, so we’re more malleable? So you can break us.”

“See you in fifteen” is all he says, then he spins on his heel and heads back down the hall.

I head toward the shower room. On the other side of the door, I pause, pinch the bridge of my nose, and tell myself there’s nothing to do but roll with it. With whatever this place throws at me. I’m on a mission—to get done whatever it is I have to do to obtain my release. Get back home, to my daughter and my company.

The shower room is a cavernous tiled space with rainfall showerheads and shower curtains that encircle each stall. Right now the room is empty, all the curtains pushed back. I shed my clothes, step inside a stall, and pull the curtain. I turn the lever. When the torrent of steaming hot water shoots out, I duck under and groan in delight.

After I’ve stood there for probably longer than I should, I remember to lather up with the minty body wash and shampoo. White suds stream into the drain at my feet, and for the first time, I start to feel calm. Then I hear the door to the shower room open, and what sounds like a group of women enter the room. No one speaks, the only sound the shucking of clothes and shoes. I peek from behind my curtain.

An assortment of clothes—mud-caked shorts and T-shirts, hiking boots, and underwear—lies heaped on the floor. Four women surround it—two white, one black, and one Latina. They’re all coated in the same filthy brown dirt, hair matted and greasy. I see the way the naked skin of their bodies contrasts with their grime-streaked arms and faces as they move toward the showers. The Latina woman is young, in her early twenties, short and round. She wears glasses and is limping.

She enters the shower next to me. The minute I hear the spray of water, she yelps.

“Agnes? You okay?” one of the other women says.

“Sí,” she says.

I stay motionless under my shower. And then I hear a low murmuring. One phrase repeated over and over again, in a quivering voice, barely audible above the sound of the water.

“Dios te salve, María . . . llena eres de gracia.”

There’s maybe less than a foot separating my curtain from hers, and a bit of a slope to the floor, and after a few seconds her runoff water streams across the tile, pooling around my feet and gurgling down into my drain. I back away, toward the wall, my eyes wide. There’s something red mixed in the dingy brown water.

Blood.





16

SHORIE

Friday night, after a few attempts to talk me into going to eat then to a party at this house on Gay Street, Dele gives up. She says goodbye, and she and Rayanne finally leave me alone.

It’s not that I dislike Dele—I like her just fine, actually—but there’s no way in hell I can hang out with a bunch of people tonight. I’m miserable, and I’m not one of those people, like my mother, who can fake happy. Parties aren’t my thing anyway. Flirting and dancing don’t exactly come naturally to me.

I stretch out on my scratchy lavender comforter that will probably smell like the inside of a Pottery Barn until time is no more and stare up at the blank white ceiling of my dorm room. The journal wasn’t in Dad’s office at Jax. Ben waited in the car while I ran up and turned the office upside down with no luck.

I roll over and smoosh my face into my faded yellow pillowcase I brought from home. My pillow is just the right amount of flat and smells heavenly, too, just like our house—a combination of the laundry detergent Mom uses, that citrusy floor polish, the rosemary candles she burns, Dad’s shaving cream, and a whiff of Foxy’s litter box tang.

That’s what does it, interestingly enough. The thought of Foxy, her white fur and single black spot right on top of her head. Her trusting green eyes blinking up at me. I start wailing and sobbing into my pillow, and all the while a part of my brain remains detached, floating somewhere up against the ceiling.