On the day I found the girl, the robins were migrating and the crape myrtles flashed with red.
Clouds rested their bellies atop the buildings. I went out for my run fast, because I knew rain was coming, and for a long time I have been sure that I will die one day by lightning strike. I have known this since the day when I was running across the parking lot at my older son’s Montessori preschool and I leapt up the wooden steps to the door and turned around and saw a lightning bolt crash and sizzle across the slick wet blacktop where I’d just been.
I turned back when the rain crashed down and made the shadows of the woods on both sides boil. There was a shortcut behind the bed-and-breakfast district, a narrow alley with overgrown rosebushes that snatch at your clothes. I didn’t see the girl until the last minute, when I had to jump her outstretched legs, and came down slantwise on the cinders, and hit my hip and shoulder and knew immediately that they were bleeding. I rolled over, and crawled back to the girl. She stared at me darkly, and twitched her legs. She was alive, then.
I saw the rip in her T-shirt. I saw her bleeding hands, the swelling already beginning on the side of her face. And the cold place in me that I’ve always had, that I have carried through many dark streets in many cities, knew.
Wait here, I said, thinking I would run to a bed-and-breakfast and call the police, an ambulance, but the girl said hoarsely, No, with such panic that I looked around and saw how dark the overgrown alley was, and thick with twining vines, how a person could be hiding in many places there. Let me take you with me, and we can call the cops, I said, and she said ferociously, No fucking cops. No ambulance.
Okay, I said, and my brain had emptied out, and I said, I’ll take you to my house. I’m only a few blocks away. She closed her eyes, and I took it for assent, and I helped her stand and saw the blood dissolving from her thighs in the rain.
The water was ankle deep in the roads already; the drivers had pulled off, waiting to be able to see. She was light. The side of her face next to mine was beautiful, long eyelashes, full lips, perfect skin, a sore-looking nose piercing. I helped her inside and rushed around to get towels and draped them over her and tenderly dabbed the shining drops of rain from her hair. She would not take tea. She would not let me call for help. She would not let me make her food. She just snapped, Fuck off, lady.
I fucked off. I let her sit and sat beside her in my kitchen. And when, after she stopped shaking I asked if I could please take her to the hospital, she barely spoke when she said, No. Home.
I put a towel on the passenger seat, and we drove through the empty wet streets with their dripping oaks and palms, and we came into the neighborhood between La Pasadita Grille and the Spanish church, and she said, Left, Right, Left, and Here.
After a storm, the sunlight in this town pours upward as though radiating from the ground, and the sudden beauty of the stucco and Spanish moss is a hard punch at the center of the heart.
I looked at the small green cabin in its yard of sandspurs and neglected orange trees and rotted fruit shimmering with wasps, and everything caught the sun and shined like blessed objects. Then I saw the broken windows and the black garbage bag on the porch spilling its guts and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Please let me help you, I said. She said, Don’t fucking say a word to anybody. And she got out of the car, slammed the door, and shuffled up the path and into the cabin.
My boys and husband were already at home. He was making dinner. That’s a lot of blood, my older son said, pointing at the piles of towels on the chair. My husband was looking at me with worry in his face. I picked the towels up and backed out the door and took them with me to the police department where I described the girl, between sixteen and twenty, probably Latina, but they could or would do nothing, until one officer succumbed to my white-woman insistence and drove to the cabin with me.
It was dark by then. I watched his flashlight go up the path, the circle of light on the door growing smaller and clearer as he neared. He knocked and knocked. Then he tried the doorknob and went in. When he came to the car, he said, Looks like she had you take her to an abandoned place. And later, dropping me off at my car, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, Those people, they’re like children, they have no— But I shot him a look of death and he stopped. But when I couldn’t stop crying, at last in frustration he said, Listen, maybe immigration was an issue, I don’t know. But lady, you can’t help people who don’t want your help.
* * *
—
On New Year’s morning, my husband and I reached our house when the sky had lightened to gray in the corner. We went in. Our children were at their grandparents’, but we were so tired and had been married too long to make much use of that fact. He went straight to bed without brushing his teeth. I peed in the dark, thinking about the one time Olivia and I had met up after the divorce for awkward drinks and she’d said she’d known her marriage was over when she found a snake in the toilet bowl. I know myself enough to understand that even if I suspected something, I would never look.
I stripped off my clothes and took a shower. Under the warm water, I thought about how, before I met my husband, I’d dated a nice man for a summer in Boston. He was good-looking, cried at movies, played ultimate, was a socialist, a nice guy, everyone said. One night we came home when the bars closed and both of us were drunk and I thought it was funny to shout, Help, help! I don’t know this man! but it made him so angry that he stalked home ahead of me and was already in bed by the time I came into his apartment. I smelled like sweat and spilled beer and cigarette smoke, and decided to take a shower that night, too. Halfway through, I heard the curtain open and only had time to say, Wait, before he’d pushed himself into me, and I pressed my cheek against the tile and let the soap sting my eyes and breathed and counted by fives until he was done. He left. I washed myself slowly until the water went cold. He was snoring when I came into his bedroom. I stood naked and shivering for a very long time, so tired that I couldn’t think, then moved and touched his dresser and opened a drawer and found a T-shirt that smelled like him and crawled under the covers to get warm enough to think again, to get it together, to go back to my own place. Instead, I fell asleep. What had happened seemed so distant when we woke up in the morning. We never talked about it. I never told anyone, not even my husband. When we broke up in a few weeks, that man dumped me.
When I came out of the bathroom, the birds were singing in the magnolia out the window and my husband was snoring. I put my wet head on his chest, and he woke up, and because he is a kind man, he hugged it and stroked my nape. My eyes were closed and I was almost asleep when I said, Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world?
Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.
Hope you’re right, I said, then fell asleep. But in the middle of the night, I woke and stood and checked all the windows and all the doors, I closed all the toilet lids, because, even though I was naked and the night was freezing, in this world of ours you can never really know.
YPORT
The mother decides to take her two young sons to France for August.
She has been ambushed all spring by quick fits, like slaps to the heart. Where they come from, she doesn’t know, but she is tired of keeling over in the soap aisle or on the elliptical or in the unlit streets where she walks her dread for hours late at night.