You lapse into silence, into stillness.
When you speak again, your voice is slow and cadenced. “You were lying on the sidewalk, facedown. Wearing that blue dress. Curled up in a ball, in the rain. Just lying there, so still. I walked past you, and then something made me stop, I still don’t know what. I turned around. Looked at you. Really saw you. I’ve walked past a thousand homeless men and women and not really seen them. But I saw you. I saw your hair, thick and black and so long. Wet and matted and sticky with blood. I saw that. The blood. Maybe that’s what stopped me. You were bleeding. Not homeless, but hurt. Curled up, but you were trying to move. Trying to crawl. I turned back, and you reached out a hand, tried to drag yourself across the sidewalk. Your fingernails had been ripped off from dragging yourself like that for who knows how long. Your fingers were shredded. Your toes, too. Bloody from crawling across the ground, bleeding. Alone. Cold and wet. Dying.”
You pause, and I see us in the reflection. Your face in profile, high cheekbones, square jaw, brownbrownbrown eyes like fragments of deepest space, black hair swept back and damp with sweat, a single strand curling on your forehead as if placed there by an artist. My profile is very similar: dark skin, olive-caramel, black eyebrows, black hair. Exotic features, wide, almond-shaped eyes darker even than yours, not truly black, which is biologically impossible, but so fiercely darkly brown as to appear so except under direct illumination. The sun is in my eyes now, so the brown is almost visible. My hair is braided, the queue hanging over my right shoulder onto the dove-gray fabric of my dress.
You breathe in, continue. “You looked at me. ‘Ayudame,’ you said. ‘Ayudame.’”
A bolt of something hot and sharp and hard and excruciating hits me. “‘Help me.’”
I slump forward against the window, leaning against it beside you.
You look at me in our reflection, surprise on your features. “You remember?”
I shake my head. “No. No more than ever, just faint impressions, like a memory of a dream. Some things are more . . . visceral, like the smell of rain. The smell of wet concrete. But I just . . . know . . . what that word means.”
“Que utilizas para hablar espa?ol, creo,” you say.
You used to speak Spanish, I think.
“Si lo hice,” I respond, surprising myself. “Aún lo hago, parece.”
Yes, I did. I still do, it seems.
“I don’t know why it never occurred to me to try speaking to you in Spanish,” you say.
“Strange, indeed.”
You eye me directly then, perhaps catching the sarcasm in my tone. It was faint, but present. “You looked so . . . pitiful. Helpless. I picked you up. You were speaking, but it was too faint and too rapid for me to catch it. Something about your parents, I remember. Spanish is one of my weaker languages, and you were mumbling, and your accent was odd. Proper Spanish, I think, from Spain. Different from the Spanish spoken by Mexicans and other Latin Americans, which is the Spanish I know.”
“How many languages do you speak?” I ask, curious.
“Five. I know some French, but not enough to be fluent, practically speaking. English, Czech, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. I’m strongest in German and Mandarin, my Czech is old and I don’t speak it much anymore, and obviously English is my primary language now.”