Page 100 of Rooster's Remorse
"Te tengo." I get it out into her shorn hair. "I've got you. We're going up that ladder and there's a truck at the top of it, and you are never coming back down here."
Behind me the doors are opening.
I hear them going one after another down that corridor, bolt after bolt, and I hear the sounds the women make when they see the light change.
I can't turn around. There's a nineteen-year-old attached to my neck and I'm not letting go first.
Lashes takes her from me at the ladder.
It's the only reason I let go. Because it's Lashes. Because it's a woman.
Lashes gets down on both knees on that concrete floor in front of a girl who won't come within arm's reach of a man.
"Hi." She keeps her hands where the girl can see them. "My name's Lashes. I was in a place like this too, at a time." She tips her head toward the ladder. "You want to hold my hand, or you want me to walk in front of you? Either one's fine. Your call."
The girl looks at her a long moment.
Then she takes her hand.
I stand in that corridor and watch it happen and I have to press the heel of my palm into my sternum to keep air moving.
Then I turn around and count.
Ten women in the corridor.
Ten.
"Twelve rooms." I hear it come out of my own mouth. "Second on the right floods. That's eleven. There should be eleven."
"Mila." Amara's at the far end of the hall and she isn't moving. "Come here."
The sixth door on the left is open, and there's a girl standing in it who is not the girl who was in it.
She's fifteen. Maybe fourteen. She's got a blanket around her shoulders and a face that hasn't finished being a child's face.
She's looking at me the way you look at something that might be about to hurt you.
I stop in the doorway.
"Where—" It comes out wrong and I start over. "Where's the woman who was in this room?"
The girl doesn't answer.
"She was maybe thirty." My hands have started moving and I make them stop. "Dark hair. She used to cry, and then she stopped. This room. She was in this room."
The girl's chin trembles once.
"She was here when they brought me," she says, in Spanish, so quietly I have to lean in to catch it. "She was here for a while."
"And then what."
"She got sick." She's looking at the floor. "In the summer. They took her up the stairs and they didn't bring her back down. Then they cleaned the room out and put me in it."
The hallway goes crooked.
I put my hand flat on the wall of the corridor, and my knees want to fold.
I lock them and stand there and take it. She's been dead since the summer.
