Page 99 of Rooster's Remorse
I'm standing in front of a piece of steel I have never seen in my life and I know exactly which one it is, because I counted it from the inside a thousand times.
I put my knuckles against it and knock twice.
The hallway goes dead silent behind me. Fourteen armed people, standing still, because a woman is knocking on a door.
Nothing comes back.
I knock again and my hand's shaking so hard the second one lands wrong, too soft, and I press my forehead flat against the cold steel and make myself do it right.
Two.
And from the other side, one knock.
She's alive.
My legs go out from under me and I catch myself on the door with both hands.
I get my mouth down close to the seam of it and I say it in Spanish, the way I said it eight months ago with blood running down my back and ninety seconds to live.
"Volví." My voice cracks in half on it. "Te lo dije. Volví."
I came back. I told you I would. I came back.
I throw the bolt and pull the door open.
She's maybe nineteen years old.
That takes the wind out of me, because I never knew.
I knew a hand on a wall. I knew a knock.
I built an entire person out of two knocks a night for two years, and here she is.
She's standing with her back to the far wall in a room seven feet by nine, a girl the size of a child, her hair cut off close to her scalp.
And she's got her fists up.
Two years down here and she's still got her fists up.
"Soy yo." I stay in the doorway and I don't move toward her. "Camila. Soy la de la pared. La que tocaba."
It's me. Camila. I'm the one from the wall. The one who knocked.
She doesn't move. Her eyes go past my shoulder to the men in the corridor, and the fear comes off her like heat off a road.
"They're mine." I switch to English and back to Spanish because my head isn't working right. "They're with me. Nobody in this hallway is going to put a hand on you. Not one of them. I brought them here to open the doors."
Her mouth moves. Nothing comes out of it.
"You knocked back." I hold onto the doorframe. "Every night. Even the nights you could barely lift your arm. You always knocked back."
Her face breaks apart.
She comes across that room and hits me hard enough to put us both into the doorframe, both arms around my neck, her whole body shaking against mine.
She says something into my shoulder I can't understand, because they aren't words, they're just sound.
I hold on to a girl I've never seen before in my life like she came out of my own body.
