Taming Cross

She looks down at her beef jerky. “Maybe.”

I feel ashamed. I rub the back of my neck and try to move our conversation back on track. “So no one knew? About Jesus?”

She shook her head. “No. He screwed his way through most of the women in Mexico before he ‘settled down’ with me.”

I close my eyes, because the zing is back. It shoots down my neck and through my bicep, down into my fingers. Damn.

“Are you okay?”

I flip my eyes open and try to lie. “Yeah. For sure. Just tired.”

“We should go to sleep, I guess. Or try to.”

I sit up straighter, ignoring the hell fire blazing down my arm. “Any ideas about when and how to leave without drawing attention from our friends?” I ask her. “I don’t know if I can fix the bike this time.”

She nods. “I have this fuzzy memory of Jesus having a garage somewhere in here. He should have a dirt bike. Possibly even a car. And there’s a garage nearby where he keeps trucks. You know, like transfer trucks, for moving cargo.” She scrunches up her face. “Drugs and guns.”

“Okay. Well good to know.”

“I wouldn’t want to go to the garage because I bet they have that guarded, but if we’re lucky, nobody knows about this place.”

Jesus, there’s that word again. Lucky.

Maybe if I’m lucky, I can dip into the wine cellar and dull some of my pain before the neuralgia takes my ass down to the ground. It’s not something I’d ever do in normal life, but then back in California, it’s okay to spend a day or two flat on my back.

“I hope we’re lucky,” I tell her.

This guy is a surprise.

When we met, I bought the whole bounty hunter thing hook-line-and-sinker. He seemed exactly as he presented himself. Chill. Secret agent or whatever.

But now— He’s had a stroke. He’s in his twenties, and he had a stroke. That’s crazy. Crazy bad. And I feel drawn to the crazy. It makes me feel less like an oddity.

And then he said that thing about being lucky, and I have to admit, it kind of ripped my heart in half. He seemed so…bitter. Sad. But it wasn’t like he was bitter at someone. It was more like he was bitter with himself. I could feel some serious self-loathing coming from him.

I show him to one of the two guest rooms—the one done in a nautical theme—and when I close the door and go to the one across the hall, I find myself wanting to talk to him more. Not just to find out more of his story, but because my own story feels so heavy tonight.

The room I’ve picked for myself was done in several shades of brown and beige and cream, with lots of textures: suede, leather, cotton, linen. The rugs are soft. The curtains on the fake-out windows dance gently in the air coming from the air vents. I turn a full circle, taking stock of every inch of the room. Not one thing has changed. I step into the en suite bathroom, and there’s the old claw-footed tub. The bear-skin rug (the one that’s really a bear’s skin). The cabinet.

I take two slow steps forward, and open the cabinet with shaking fingers. And there it is. My old toothbrush, from the last time I was here. The one and only time I wasn’t in the basement. It’s pink and purple, with a tube of my favorite sensitive toothpaste on the shelf beside it.

I snatch the robe and gown out of the cabinet and dash back to the bed. I yank the covers down and climb beneath them and I think about my toothbrush in the bathroom and I start to cry. I cry because one time, I was almost happy here. In the basement, there’s a box of books Jesus ordered me. Second-hand books from a used bookstore online, and when Jesus and I came here so he could meet David, I would lie in bed and read all weekend. And my life sucked so much then, I was able to fool myself into feeling almost happy.

I think about my sweet kids at the clinic and I really sob, because that truly did feel almost perfect but it was never meant to last. And now I’m gone! I’m not in Jesus’s world and I’m not helping anyone and there’s nowhere for me in America and I’m no one! I’m never anyone for long enough to figure out who I am and nothing stays the same, no one can ever make it right—it’s just me. Like a fish living in a sand box or on a table. I don’t know what my version of water is, but I know I’m never in it. I can never get myself straight. I’m not even a real person, and it hurts worse now that I don’t have the children or the Sisters or even Jesus to buy me used books.

I’m pathetic.

I just want to go to sleep.

I cry and cry and cry and cry, until I feel like my insides have turned to liquid. I think of Sean and the tears slow down. I think of family back in Georgia and I can’t feel much of anything. Soon I’m just lying there on my back, staring at the canopy, and I find myself thinking about Evan again.

The way his face looked when he said he felt lucky.

I don’t feel lucky either. That’s my secret.

I want to feel lucky, and I want to be grateful, and I want to be thankful for the breaks I’ve had, but instead I just feel lost.

I’m hugging my pillow when I hear moaning.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I follow the sound to Evan’s door and when I get there, I’m not sure what to do. Is he having some kind of nightmare? I knock lightly, but the moaning doesn’t stop. I try the door, and it’s locked.

“Evan?”

I’m answered with a moaned word I can’t understand.

I knock there times, hard and loud. “Evan, are you okay? It’s Meredith.”

I pause, weirded out that I gave him my real name. For a long time, I went by Missy and then I was Merri at the convent.

“Evan?”

My whole body tenses as I wait for him to answer. Finally he does: “’M okay. Jus’ sleepin’.” But I can hear him making some other kind of sound, the kind of sound weight-lifters make at the Olympics when they’re trying to lift like two tons.

I open my mouth to say No you’re not sleeping, but I remember there’s no reason to be talking through the door. Evan’s bedroom has another entrance. Because this is the room Jesus built for other pleasure slaves: the kind who, occasionally, would pass through here before being routed to another market—often European. Male slaves. So the en suite bathroom is a bridge between the guestroom and Jesus and David’s quarters.

Just as I step back to turn and go the other way, I hear another awful moan, followed by the rustling of bedding.

“Evan? What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t answer, and that really bothers me.

I take off running toward Jesus’s door before I realize I won’t be able to get in. I don’t have the code for that. Frack!