“I’ll-why don’t I…?” the woman who had been telling a story said. She made a move toward Cass’s clothes pile and hesitated. She looked Cass in the eye and spoke slowly and clearly. She was old enough to be a grandmother- old enough to be Ruthie’s grandmother, anyway. She had several inches of silver roots, an expensive dye job now losing ground, what must have been a severe bob softening to a wispy cut around her chin. “I’m Sonja,” she said carefully. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take these things, bring you back clothes that are clean, that you can wear on your… That will be good for traveling.”
Cass made a sound in her throat, a rusty and ill-used sound that was meant to convey gratitude. Hot dampness pricked at her eyes and she found that her lips did not move well. But Sonja just nodded and swept up the mess of clothes, hugging them against her body as though they didn’t stink, as though Cass had chosen and treasured them, rather than the truth-that she couldn’t say who she’d taken them from and what she’d done to the person who wore them before.
Cass wanted to watch Sonja walk away, to watch the filthy and hated rags disappear, but she knew that if she did she ›wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the bath, and the bath was a rare treat. She had not had or even allowed herself to dream of having such a thing in such a long time. There had been several moonlight splashes in the streams and creeks that crisscrossed the foothills, but the water never came up any farther than midankle, and no matter how Cass cupped her hands and splashed, she succeeded only in wetting her clothes and her skin, never cleansing them.
She approached the trough, the concrete cold and rough on her bare feet, focusing on the steam that rose into the evening air.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman who was undressing pause, her jeans folded in her hands. She had not yet spoken, and unlike the others, she had made no move to welcome Cass. Hostility came off her in waves. The others had somehow made their peace with Cass, with what she had done to Sammi-but this woman did not want her there.
Cass inhaled deeply of the steam. Someone had crumbled something aromatic into the water, bath beads or powder or something else that perfumed the air with lavender and created a thin layer of white bubbles. She longed to dip her fingertips into the water.
She was so filthy. She could barely abide herself, and she wanted desperately to wash even a little of her shame away.
Instead she forced herself to turn away from the water, toward the silent woman. “I’ll go, if you want me to,” she offered quietly.
But the woman-she was a handsome woman with a short, no-nonsense haircut and sharp cheekbones-picked up her shoes and socks and glared at Cass. “No,
“I’m sorry,” Cass said to the others, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I should-”
“Stay,” one of the women said. “I’m Gail. Trust me, you need this way worse than she does.”
Cass was grateful, but she stared down at her hands, crisscrossed with cuts from running into dead shrubs and trees, and from falling in the dark. The nails were black and broken, her wrists creased with dirt. Her own odor was strong enough that she caught sour whiffs when she moved; she could only imagine how she smelled to others. “If you don’t mind,” she said, suddenly near tears and more humbled than she had ever felt in her life. “I’d like to stay.”
“I was about done,” Gail said, flipping thick brown braids over her shoulders and stepping aside to make room. “But don’t worry, I’ll stick around and chat.”
She stepped closer, her smile slipping when her glance fell to the nearly healed wounds on Cass’s arms. When she looked in Cass’s eyes again, her curiosity was edged with sadness.
“Did you do that?” she asked, and for one heart-skipping moment Cass thought Gail knew, that she had guessed, about the attack, the Beaters, everything.
And then the truth hit her, bringing clarity, but no lessening of shame.
Gail thought she’d harmed herself.
And she wasn’t wrong. Not about the story, only about the details.
There were days…dark days, when the end of the evening approached with no relief in sight, no one to slip into the shadows with, no strong man to bend her over double until there was no room for her own regrets, nights when every shot she downed added to her screaming headache without ever bringing the blessed numb of forgetting. And on those nights, once or twice…or three or four times…she’d found that sharp thing, the shard of broken ashtray, the coiled end of the corkscrew, the dull knife a bartender cut limes with… She found the thing and she traced the shape of her shame until she could finally focus on the pain and forget the rest.
So, yes. Once, she’d borne the road map of shame on her skin. And was this really so different, these marks made by her own hands, in a fever she didn’t remember?
She hung her head and blinked at the hot mist in her eyes. Immediately Gail put her hand, warm and comforting, on Cass’s wrist, in the small band of unmolested flesh between her hand and the first of the chewed places.
“I’m sorry,” Gail murmured. “Please, just…just forget I said anything. Past is past here, if you want it to be. Everyone gets to start again.”
Cass shivered, unable to speak.
“Well, look,” Nance said, interrupting the moment with deliberate cheer. “Look, we’re just glad you’re here. You’re the first new face we’ve had in…well, a while. I’ve been going nuts here with all these yokels.”
“Nance isn’t cut out for small-town living,” Gail said, withdrawing her hand after a final squeeze. The moment had passed, nothing more than milkweed on the breeze. “She’s way too upscale for the rest of us.”
“I’m from Oakland,” Nance said. “I just came up here to help my mother when things went bad. I never dreamed I’d get stuck here.”
“Nance isn’t much of a nature person,” Gail said. “She keeps wishing she’d wake up and there’d be room service.”
“I put in this shower last year,” Nance said. “In my condo? One of those rain shower ones? There were jets along the side, steam…”
“And I bet you never had any trouble finding someone to share it with you, right?” Gail said, winking at Cass. “Nance also doesn’t like the men here.”
Cass dipped her washcloth into the warm water, savoring the sensation of the water closing over her fingers, her hand, her wrist. Slowly, she trailed the cloth in an underwater figure eight. “I’ll ruin this water. It’ll be filthy when I’m done.”
Gail shrugged. “It wasn’t exactly crystal clear to start with. We just drag it up from the creek. We don’t bother to strain it or purify it when it’s just for washing.”
Nance wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, it smells a little like rotting fish. I don’t know what we’ll do when we run out of shower gel to hide the smell.”
“We’ll stink,” Gail said. “Just like we do now, only by then we’ll all be so used to it that it won’t matter.”
It was all the encouragement Cass needed. She submerged her arms up to her elbows, then lowered her face into the water and stayed under as long as her breath held out. She came up with the water dripping down her face and blinked it out of her eyes. “Ohhh,” she breathed.
“Tell you what,” Gail said. “I have a little shampoo left.”
“Oh, I couldn’t-” Cass said.
“Yeah, you can.” Gail reached into a plastic tote. “Put your hand out.”
Cass did as she was told and Gail squeezed out a dollop of creamy shampoo. It smelled like rosemary, and it was familiar; Cass had a bottle of it once, long ago. She held it up to her face and breathed as deeply as she could, trying to imprint the memory of the smell in her brain. Then she rubbed it onto her cropped hair and began to work it into her scalp, taking her time, making small circles.
The hair around her hairline was growing in soft and fine; Cass wondered if pulling it out had damaged the roots in some way. Before, when she was a teenager, she remembered her mother warning her that if she plucked her eyebrows too often the hair wouldn’t grow back. She had believed her mother. Before Byrn. When it was just the two of them, her mother taking such care in her mirror in the morning and before dates, Cass sitting on the edge of the tub to talk to her. She thought that might have been when her mother was happiest, when she was getting ready for a new man. Before there had been time for him to disappoint her or, in the end, to leave her.
