The Nowhere Girls(88)
She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look toward where the sound was coming from, doesn’t look anywhere. She just runs. She moves so fast she can’t think, she can’t feel. She runs out the door and down the street, and even though she isn’t breathing, even though she forgot how, and her bones feel like breaking, and her veins feel like knives, and everything in the world wants to hurt her, everything in her body is a threat, her mind violent static, razor blades, glass, even though her entire existence is a war zone, she runs and runs and runs until she falls through the door of her house, until she lands on her knees, a pile of bruises and broken skin, until she finds the corner where there is at least one thing in the world that is sturdy, and she backs up against it, and Spot arrives, ears erect, just in time to hear the moan escape from Erin’s broken-glass lungs, the sound like a whole soul deflating, a whole life imploding under the pressure of too much gravity, too much weight, elephant bones in a bird-girl’s body, breaking, breaking, breaking.
This is what happens when feelings are stronger than will, when everything that was stuffed away explodes out of the shadows. This is what happens when the feelings win and Erin loses.
She is rocking with the pulse of a bigger heart, her body a metronome, the back of her head banging against the wall as it keeps time, one two one two one two, and Spot to the rescue, nudging Erin with his nose, trying to put himself between her body and the wall, trying to make himself a pillow. She needs impact, something touching, something pounding, something marking the violence of her body existing in this world.
Spot softens the blow with his body. He is a living, breathing cushion. But Erin is not done hurting, not done breaking. She hits her face with her own hand. She hits and hits and hits. She hurts herself because she has to, because everything hurts so much already, because it is the only way to change the hurt, to move it somewhere else, so it will not swallow her up entirely. She has to fight, she has to fight something, and she is the only thing here to fight.
But Spot is there, his sharp teeth so gentle as he takes Erin’s hand in his mouth and pulls it away, like a mother with a wandering puppy and the loose, trusting flesh at the scruff of its neck, and it is this tenderness that ultimately wins, not Erin’s fighting herself, it is Spot wedging his eighty-plus pounds of dog into Erin’s lap, on top of her arms so she can do no more damage, so her only choice is to hold him, to feel the comfort of his weight on top of her, to be silenced and stilled by a creature who is programmed to do nothing but love her.
And that’s when Erin’s mother walks through the front door with her arms full of groceries. In this moment Erin cannot reach the world outside herself, cannot hear the grocery bags fall to the floor, cannot hear the cracks and splats of the eggshells, cannot hear her mother cry, “What happened? What happened?” In this moment Erin is only vaguely aware of her mother’s presence, and she knows nothing of the world inside her, the locked-up place where her mother is screaming too—helpless, powerless, tortured by love, as she kneels beside her unreachable daughter and knows there is nothing she can do to help. She knows she cannot touch her, cannot wrap her in her arms and rock her the way her instincts demand. And Erin cannot even consider that comfort in this moment, cannot see outside her body’s dense world of pain, cannot comprehend that there is anyone in the world who wants to help her, that there is anyone in the world who can.
Spot starts to whimper. He cannot escape Erin’s tight embrace. She won’t let go. She can’t. Her arms are vises that her mother has to carefully pry away.
ROSINA.
“Get over here right now,” Mami growls as soon as Rosina enters the restaurant kitchen.
“I’m not even late!” Rosina answers. In fact, she’s early. She didn’t even put up a fight when Mami told her to come in an hour early to help deep clean the walk-in fridge.
“Your principal called me today,” Mami says.
“What’d she want?” Rosina says coolly, despite the sudden panic in her chest.
“I don’t know yet,” Mami says, her eyes narrow, suspicious. “She left a message that she wanted to talk to me about something important. She said I could call her on her cell phone any time.”
“So why didn’t you call her?”
“I wanted to wait for you to be here.”
“How nice of you,” Rosina says, trying to act like the floor is not crumbling beneath her feet, like there is still ground for her to stand on. As Mami takes her phone out of her pocket to call Slatterly back, Rosina tries to look relaxed as she sits on a crate in the corner of the kitchen, but she can barely feel her legs.
“Hello? Mrs. Slatterly?” Mami says. “This is Maria Suarez, Rosina Suarez’s mother?”
As she watches Mami listen to whatever Slatterly’s saying, Rosina thinks she may know, just a little, what crucifixion must feel like—being tortured, unable to move, victim to the whims of whoever’s in power. With every uh-huh and yes Mami answers, her eyes fill with fire, they explode with rage and disgust, and Rosina shrinks, hardens, turns into ice.
“She wants to talk to you,” Mami says, the words barely able to make it out of her clenched jaw as she shoves the phone in her daughter’s face. Rosina stands up and lifts the phone to her ear, turns around and looks at a discolored patch on the wall, and wishes it could absorb her like so many years’ worth of grease stains.