I pull the whole thing from her head in one movement. I almost forgot about her hair, the way she had it tucked up in the cap, but now it unfurls from the loose knot that had been coiled out of sight. I can’t see it—I can’t see a damn thing—but I feel it. Ignacio must’ve supplied some good goddamn hair product, because there’s silken strands running over my knees, across my hands as they hold hers, even in my lap, where I’ve dropped the ski cap for now. It’s like satin, and it’s literally everywhere.
I’d say it was suffocating to have so much of her hair in here, but it feels so soft, so lustrous, a faint tickle on my skin wherever it brushes against me, that it’s anything but suffocating. It’s… fucking mesmerizing. I haven’t focused on anything except her survival (and mine) until this point. Haven’t had a second to think. So now, in this moment, shame rises along my skin as I welcome her touch. Disgust rises in my throat as I savor the caress of her flaxen hair on my skin. Rage pulses in my temples as I try not to fall under the spell of being in the dark with a girl who needs anything except the things I want to give her right now. I think about cold showers, about that time I got shot in the shoulder and the pain that came from that. I think about treating that FBI agent in San Francisco after some Russian bastard had pulled every one of her adult teeth out trying to get information out of her. In the end, it’s only that image that voids whatever terrible things I was picturing about Seraphina….
I don’t even know her last name.
Maybe she doesn’t have one.
For now, she’s safe, and we can rest. So that’s how we fall asleep, together, a tangle of limbs and her impossibly long hair everywhere, like the softest vines, curling around me until I’m pulled under.
SERAPHINA
The first day, I am fearful.
The second day, after Xavier has gradually exposed me to little bits of light, I can actually sit in the Motel room he’s brought me to and open my eyes without crying. The curtains are still drawn tightly shut, but he opens the door in increasing intervals until I tell him to stop.
The third day, I can have the curtains open for small stretches of time.
I still can’t believe I am out, rescued, the girl in the tower now removed. I feel… odd. Empty. Terrified. It’s not that I miss Ignacio, but I kind of do, at the same time. I miss the familiarity of his visits, the predictability of his torture. At least when he hurt me, I could brace myself because I expected it. Every time I choked on him, every time he put his hands around my neck and squeezed, I knew exactly how many seconds it would be until he let go, until he finished, until I had to swallow like a good girl and then scuttle off to the shower. I knew when to eat—once a day, so my clothes would fit—and I knew what to say, and where to kneel, and when to open my mouth and stick my tongue out.
Now, I don’t know anything. I don’t know how to choose something to wear from the plastic bags of clothes Xavier has somehow acquired during the long stretches when I sleep sitting up in the closet. I like it in there; it feels safe, and warm, like a mother’s womb probably feels. I am the helpless fawn, falling over herself, trying to stand steady and failing. I don’t even know how to exist in this strange new world, full of unbearable light and mind-numbing noise. The food smells different. The sheets feel odd. Everything is wrong.
I eat little mouthfuls of things, the feeling of fullness from this strange new food a strange and tiring sensation. Ignacio likes me small, my hips prominent, my breasts pubescent. He has kept me trapped inside a child-sized body, even as I grew into a woman. And now Xavier sits across from me in the kitchen he calls tiny but I find spacious and looming, watching me as I try to eat—sometimes three times in one day! I feel sick from the constant food. I prefer it in the closet, where it is cool and dark and I float atop a stack of pillows and blankets, suspended between realities. If I could live in the closet for the rest of my life, my hands pressed against the thin walls, I surely would.
The fourth day, everything changes again.
Because suddenly, we have to leave. It isn’t safe anymore. Xavier is pacing, he is on the phone, he is methodically packing things in bags that he takes out to his truck, one by one, until all that’s left is me, and the food in the refrigerator. He comes back in one last time, closing the door behind him with a finality that has every nerve in my body on edge, waiting to react. He’s going to kill me, now. No he’s not. Yes, he is!
“Phina,” Xavier says to me, a pair of scissors in one hand, a rectangular package in the other. “Before we go. I have to cut your hair off.”
I instinctively grab at the long braid draped over my shoulder.
Xavier’s eyes are kind, even as he holds the scissors at his side like a weapon. He told me that he used a scalpel to stab Ignacio. What will he do to me?
“No,” I whisper. “No!”
“I’m so sorry,” he says, setting the rectangular package down and taking something from the back pocket of his jeans. A smaller rectangle, this one is flat, and stamped with the word PASSPORT. He flips it open to a page and holds it in front of me. It’s a girl with dark brown hair, almost black, that falls to her shoulders in a blunt line.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Who is this?”
He takes the passport back, pocketing it as he gestures toward the bathroom. “It’s about to be you,” he says.
In the bathroom, there is a mirror. I have done everything I can to avoid this mirror—another thing to add to the list of things that terrify me. My own reflection.
Xavier stands behind me, a foot taller than me at least, and I marvel for the first time at the way we look together. Like a painting, like a dream—a tiny pale girl, wearing a braid for a crown, and the angel who visits her in that same dream.
I stare down into the basin as Xavier busies himself behind me. He sets up a towel under my feet, several plastic ziplock bags next to the sink. “We can’t leave anything behind,” he says. “Especially not your hair. They’ll be onto us like lightning.”
I saw lightning once, when I was a girl and the windows still opened. I don’t want anything to be on me like lightning. I stare at my toes, at the basin, at the dirt in the cracks between the glossy powder-blue tiles I’m standing on.
“Are you okay?” Xavier asks. I nod tightly, unable to look up. Suddenly, I feel him freeze behind me. He knows.
“You’ve never seen yourself in the mirror,” he says.
I shake my head tightly. Never. Never, ever. I’ve seen myself in the back of a dull spoon, in the reflection of Ignacio’s reading glasses, but those were so fleeting, so small. No, I have never seen myself.
“Seraphina,” Xavier says, his voice low, insistent. He uses a single finger to tip my chin up. I close my eyes. I don’t know why I’m so scared.
He’s closer. I can feel the heat between our bodies, my back melting into his chest, his bare arms brushing against mine. “I-I can’t,” I stammer.
“Yes, you can,” he says. “You are beautiful, Phina. You deserve to know that. Look.”