Page 87 of Rooster's Remorse
Nobody at that table is moving.
"You hear whatever happens next. It goes on a long time or it doesn't. Sometimes there's talking, and the talking's worse than anything, because you can hear how comfortable they are. Men who are worried about getting caught don't chat." I push through it. "And afterward, you knock. Two on the wall means are you alive. One back means yes. So you lie there in the dark waiting on one knock, and if it doesn't come, if there's nothing on the other side of that wall, you keep going anyway, because there's not one thing you can do about it from eleven feet underground."
Somebody breathes out hard. I don't look to see who.
"That's the sound. Every night for years. And it's still going on tonight, right now, while we sit in a warm room with the door shut and Ruby making lunch."
"Jesus Christ," Boulder says, low.
"Now here's the part that's your business," I say, "because you're right, Zorro. You're not wrong, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you that you are. They're not yours. Not your blood,no claim on this club, and nobody at this table owes them a single thing."
Zorro looks up at me.
"But I do."
The room's dead silent.
"The night I got out, I got out through the client building, because they'd brought me up for a whipping and left me above ground afterward. That's the only reason I'm breathing. And on my way past that hallway, bleeding, with the ledger in my shirt and maybe ninety seconds before somebody came looking?—"
My voice goes and I have to stand there and get it back.
"I stopped."
Nobody moves.
"I could've run. I want everybody in this room to understand that I was ninety seconds from the fence and I stopped, and I've asked myself a thousand times since whether that was brave or whether it was the stupidest thing I've ever done, because if they'd caught me at that door I'd have died in the dirt and nobody would ever have known those women existed." I press my palms flat on the chair back. "I stopped, and I put my hand on the eighth door on the left, and I knocked twice. And she knocked back. One knock. She was alive."
I look at Amara.
"And I said the only thing I had time to say.Volveré.I'll come back."
Nobody says anything.
"I've had nine months of freedom, and I haven't had one single night where I didn't hear myself say it. It's the last thing out of my head before I sleep and the first thing in it when I wake up in a warm bed in this building. Every morning I lie there and think about how many nights it's been since I said it. Two hundred and eighty-one." My whole face is wet now. "That's this morning's number. I'll have a new one tomorrow. I've had a newone every day since I crawled out of that place, and every single one of them is a day she woke up and I didn't come."
The shaking's arrived in my hands and I put them behind my back.
"I walked across a desert. I sat in Marie Kincaid's kitchen for months doing nothing, because I couldn't do it alone. I still can't." My voice is in pieces and I don't care anymore. "That's why I'm standing in a room I've got no business standing in, in front of men who don't owe me anything. I'm not asking you to care about eleven strangers. You're right that you don't have to. I'm asking you to help me keep my word."
I have to get the last of it out fast or I won't get it out.
"Because I gave it. And it's the last thing I own. They took my parents, they took my body, and they took nine years. They took every single thing I ever wanted for myself, and they didn't get that. That one's mine. It's the only thing I walked out of there with besides a notebook, and if I don't keep it, then they got all of it after all."
Silence.
Then Lashes stands up beside me. "Zorro."
His face changes before she says anything else. "Yes, ma'am."
"You said we should go after mine first."
"I did."
"Then say the rest of it out loud, because I don't think you heard yourself." Lashes's voice is perfectly level. "Say who I was, the night Sally Bernard sold me out of that lot."
Zorro doesn't answer.
"I'll say it. I wasn't anybody's ol' lady. I wasn't patched. I wasn't kin to one man at this table by blood. I was a prospect who did the dishes." She hasn't raised her voice an inch. "I was somebody else's problem. And I sat in a room in Colombia for months doing the same counting she just described to you, andevery night I told myself the same lie, which is that somebody was coming."
