The conductor mumbles again, and the train stops in a station. Most everyone gets off, including the man who gave me his seat, who doesn’t even spare me a glance on the way out.
The doors beep and close. The conductor mumbles. The train whines before it moves. There’s an uneven but repeating pattern to it.
“They’re changing trains.” I point toward the poster with a red line across the middle. She shakes her head. “No?”
“Yes. You’re right.” She pats my hand. “If you keep this up, I may get home soon.”
St. Easy. Home for her. And maybe home for Dario and me. Or we’ll stay where we are. I’m in an in-between place where I can hope for everything.
“Do they miss you? Down there in St. Easy?”
“The women? Some do. Some, I’m sure, are glad I’m not there to boss them around.” She chuckles to herself. “You know Nella Faria?”
“Kind of? I saw her in church, but we weren’t in the same… I guess you’d call it a social circle.”
“Same cohort.” She confirms the word I assume she won’t use. “Well, Nella came to us about a year ago. Caught dancing numerous times apparently.” She tsks. “Now, she dances all the time, which you’d think, ‘good for her,’ but she tries to do things, jumps and such, that she shouldn’t be doing. We have no coach down there to teach her to do it right. So she winds up concussed, and without me? Neil’s got his hands full already.”
“Who’s Neil?” I figure, at this point, I should learn about St. Easy before Dario and I join her there.
Her expression warms and her head tilts, as if my question triggered happy thoughts.
“Neil is a doctor. Educated in London, born and raised in paradise.” She can barely speak, she’s smiling so hard. “Heart as big as his… well. He’s a good man.”
“How did you meet him?”
“That island… we have three vets and two pharmacists. But he’s the only doctor, and I had to call him once a week for Joanne Mongeluzzo. She was in bad shape. Anyway, every time, he was like, ‘Where did this girl come from? What did you do to her?’ And I couldn’t tell him because who would believe it? Let’s just say he did not appreciate that. We were like this.” She bumps her fists together. “Then one day I brought Rosemarie in for a fever, and he grilled her like a criminal, thinking he’d get to me. Now, most of you fall apart when a man’s the least bit stern, but Roe? She shut him down. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ And ‘Who do you think you are? You’re gonna cure my fever. Willa saved my life.’ I was so proud of her, and it shut his mouth. But a man who’s not too busy talking is a man with a busy mind. He got even more curious.”
She stops the story as we pull into a station and the ambient noise in the car gets too loud to talk quietly. Most everyone gets out of the car, and only a few passengers get on.
“When do we get off?” she asks.
I check the map, then the station we’re leaving. “Next stop.”
“Good. Very good.”
“So, Neil?”
“He chased me.” She practically glows when she thinks about him.
Do I glow like that when I think of Dario? What I feel inside doesn’t match Willa’s serene expression.
“You ran?” I ask.
“I didn’t need a man weighing me down, but he caught me, heart first. Now he lives in the house with me. I couldn’t manage all the girls without him.”
Willa’s the most competent person I’ve ever met, and Colonia girls who run away are too much to manage alone. We’re too broken and useless.
“We can’t be that bad,” I say, hoping she’ll relieve either my guilt or shame. But she does neither.
“Honey, none of you are bad, but every one of you’s been living in a shadow world. You’re all ground down. The constant fear eats at the heart. Obedience destroys the mind.”
“I don’t feel destroyed.”
“You’re in good shape right out of the gate. But the only reason you can put two and two together on your own is because of who your father is. You had it easy. Comparatively.”
The train rocks back and forth, speeding through the tunnel.
“Is that good or bad?”
“We’ll find out.” She smiles at me, but I’m not comforted.
Willa shows me how streets and avenues are counted, how to tell which direction you’re going, and how addresses flow from one number to the next. It’s so engaging, I don’t recognize the block until we’re halfway down it.
Home. I am ho… wait.
This isn’t home. It’s where I was taken against my will. It’s where I was imprisoned and starved.
The last time I stood outside the lobby doors, I was carrying a bag of Quick Lick soup and a piece of candy. This building is where I learned to speak my mind. To say no. To say yes. To know the difference.
“We can go back in?” I’m frozen in front, remembering how we sped out from the underground garage’s emergency exit.
“According to Oria and Benny,” Willa says, “we can go back starting tomorrow. But I have a few things to pick up from my apartment… if it’s still there.”
Of course it’s still there. Unless she’s wondering if we… they stole all her things.
The Colonia may be a lot of things. We’re not thieves.
Or maybe they are.
CHAPTER 26
SARAH
Picking up a few things doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to Willa.
Neil’s kind eyes and wickedly handsome face are on her phone screen as she picks through the clothes she left when she first moved to the house with the button-rich kitchen. They’re laughing at how skinny she was.
Are the clothes upstairs too small on me now? Or too big? I feel like I’m the same size.
Also, I’m hungry. Does Quick Lick go bad? Because I think there’s still some up in Dario’s apartment.
“Willa?” I interrupt.
“Yes, honey?”
“I’m going up to my old apartment.”
She hands me the key that will get me to the restricted floors. “You stay away from that greenhouse.”
“Okay.”
“Be safe, Sarah,” Neil says from his rectangle.
“I promise not to trip or stub my toe.”
The elevator takes forever, so I take the stairs. I find myself slowing on the landing where Dario chose to lose his war rather than kidnap me again—and chose to die over separating from me.
It’s a nice memory, but a violent one.
Which is why the distant scream doesn’t shock me at first. I don’t jump out of my skin. I stand there, waiting for another. When it doesn’t come, I slowly and quietly climb the stairs, listening.
The top floor hallway is quiet, but subtly wrong. The suite door is closed, but the middle one is ajar. A bottle cap leans in against the corner jamb of the office’s double doors. One of the bulbs in the recessed lighting is out.
I’m about to push open the middle door when I hear the scream again. My spine turns into an icicle and the surface of my skin tingles. I’m aware of the breath in my lungs and the pressure of the floor under my feet. A light splash-stain is almost hidden in the wallpaper pattern. The elevator cables churn in their shaft. More voices come through the walls. A slight echo. A crack far away. I turn slowly. The stairway door is still open, and the sounds I’m newly aware of are coming from there.