On the sixth day—maybe it’s the seventh, I don’t know anymore—I can barely move; I lay against the ground, one side of my face pressed to a mound of dirt, my muscles aching, and I’m so dehydrated—maybe the bucket of water was only a hallucination—that my lips are stuck together, and I see spots whenever I try to sit up.
I hear keys jangling outside the room again, and I force myself to sit up straight, to face her with the same strength and defiance as I have every day before this one. But when the door opens, it’s not the woman this time, but a man I’ve never seen before. Without a word or gesture, he grabs my elbow and pulls me to my feet.
Finally!
He yanks on my arm and I follow him out into the hallway, trying not to stumble, but I do anyway. My head is pounding; I can barely feel my legs carrying my body forward, but I manage to follow—my life depends on it. Entering a larger room, the size of a modest banquet hall, and then outside into the cool night air, I’m unsurprised by what I see. This isn’t the same compound I spent most of my young life, but it could be, the way it feels the same and smells the same and how the desert landscape that surrounds it stretches out for miles in every miserable direction. And the buildings are almost the same, made of concrete and aluminum and wood; unbarred windows dress the bricks with a very false sense of freedom; a great fence climbs high past the rooftops, wrapped by barbed wire and guarded by armed men.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask weakly.
The man never speaks.
He escorts me across the compound and toward a truck; he opens the door and shoves me on the passenger’s seat.
We drive for six hundred sixty seconds—I made sure to count every single one in case I need to find my way back for Naeva later—and pull onto the paved driveway of a stucco mansion perched amid the desert like an oasis.
Before I’m taken inside, the man leads me to a side building that reminds me of a guest house, where a woman awaits. Older, abuela-type, with gray-black hair pulled loosely around her plump face; she’s wearing a long, blue dress that hugs her lumpy figure and drops to her thick ankles. She stands in front of an open shower, a long-handled scrubbing brush clutched in her hand.
I fall forward when the man pushes me in the back toward her, barely catching myself before I hit the floor.
The man leaves us, and without even introducing herself, the old woman gets to work, stripping me of my soiled clothes. And, to my disappointment, she undoes every braid, her rough hands pulling and yanking my hair; I watch the birth control pills I’d so carefully hidden within the braids, clink against the tile floor and disappear. My heart sinks. But then again, in the back of my mind I knew I’d never get to use them; I only brought them with me to make me feel better—the effort has to count for something, right? If I make it out of this alive, I’m getting the surgery I should’ve gotten a long time ago. No kids for me. A life like mine doesn’t need or deserve them. I accepted that fact even before I became what I became. I accepted it shortly after I met Victor. It was the number one reason I went back to Mexico the first time; why I killed Javier’s brothers…
Scalding water blisters my skin as it gushes from the shower head onto my back like acid from a water-hose. I cry out, and almost hit the old woman in the face, but I refrain. I close my eyes and bite down on the inside of my cheek and let her wash me, scrub my skin raw with the brush; the soap stings and burns like vinegar poured into open wounds. And when she’s done, she dresses me in a plain black T-shirt and a pair of black cotton shorts. She combs the tangles from my hair and she sprays underneath my armpits with deodorant and she brushes my teeth—I wonder if she’ll wipe my ass, too.
Afterwards, the woman takes me outside where the same man from before is waiting.
As we approach the front entrance of the two-story mansion—it’s small for a mansion, but lavish and expensive—I feel strength somehow without water and food and sleep, returning to my neglected body. And more important, confidence returning to the rest of me. If the blonde-haired woman, who I know waits for me somewhere on the other side of those double-doors, was going to kill me, she’d have done it by now. I wouldn’t have been given a shower, or clean clothes to wear. This ‘plan’ that I made up on a whim, was nowhere in the realm of what I expected to happen; I thought for sure I’d come here and end up the same tortured slave girl I was when I escaped in the back of Victor’s car a couple years ago. I envisioned, and mentally prepared myself for all of the awful things I know, in my heart, Naeva is going through right now. But this, whatever it is, whatever it turns out to be, I never saw coming. And although I’m still unsure in which direction this is going, I can honestly say I feel better about it. I’m not sure why, but deep down, I know I’m in a better position to pull this off than I ever could have imagined.