Mama still didn’t look at me, and all I could do was stare at her.
None of it even sounded real. I couldn’t even believe my ears. There was no way it could possibly be real, except that only two days before, I had been lying in the cold, hard proof that it was.
There was honestly no explanation, except that my prolifically faulty memory had somehow short-circuited the rest of my mind and triggered a total meltdown.
And even if there was another explanation… what my mother had just told me was the explanation my father believed, and I was at his complete and total mercy. Now that I was a college drop-out, there was no way for me to leave and provide for myself while I somehow figured out an alternate explanation. Now that Malachi was gone, there would be no engagement, no marriage, no future with him, no life that we had always dreamed of and planned for.
I was only nineteen, and I’d already lost everything.
I had nothing.
At least… nothing that my father wouldn’t provide for me. And he was already so fed up with me that he sounded like merely allowing me to live in his home was now the single luxury I had left.
My face was wet with hot tears of disbelief, and all I could say was, “I’m so sorry, Mami. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m so sorry.”
Her throat pulsed with a swallow, and she still didn’t look at me. “It is perhaps for the best that you don’t remember. I can’t imagine that any of it was good.”
And then, she left my room, closing the door quietly behind her.
I sat, still like a statue, in total silence, as the weight of reality bore down on me so hard that it felt like it would literally crush my bones. As I sat in a stupor, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror above my dresser, and for a second, it startled me.
The girl looking back at me looked like a stranger.
I pushed my aching body off the bed to cross the room and look more closely at myself.
I wasn’t just thin. My appearance bordered on skeletal. My clothing hung from my frame like I was little more than a hanger. My hair was stringy and dull. My complexion pasty like I hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks. Bruises peeked out below the baggy sleeves of the t-shirt, and I couldn’t tell if they were remnants of track marks from shooting up or from the altercation Mamá spoke of. Every part of me hurt, but in my more intimate places I could feel what was clearly the after-effects of rough sex. Sex with someone who obviously wasn’t Malachi. And I couldn’t even remember it.
I couldn’t look at myself.
A hair brush sat on the dresser, and I picked it up. Wielding it like a sledgehammer, I smashed all of the glass out of the mirror, and it scattered all over the place. Shards of it sliced the bottoms of my bare feet as I turned and stalked back to my bed.
The last time I’d been in this bed was the day Malachi and I both left for our fall semesters. Only an hour before we were kissing goodbye next to the door and then having sex against the wall right before he had to go to the airfield to return to Corwick.
It was the last time I saw him in person.
Staring at the bed now, I knew the maids had been in countless times to clean the room and change the linens, so there would be no lingering scent of him. But that didn’t stop me from climbing between the sheets, bleeding feet and all, and wrapping myself up tightly so I could bury my face in the mattress in desperation to suck in oxygen, hoping that I could smell something.
And miraculously… I did.
I swore that I did.
He’d been in this bed thousands of times, and I swore that his scent was still lingering here in this secret, sacred space that had been ours alone.
And it was all I had left of him.
I did not cry.
Lest my tears wash away the last remaining molecules of his precious scent, I did not cry.
After all, how are you able to cry if your heart and soul are suddenly just gone?
ISLA
Present
“NYPD, OFFICER DETORIO SPEAKING,” a burly-sounding man answers.
I hesitate, glancing at my bedroom door, and then cross the room to check that it’s totally closed.
“Um, hi,” I say, taking long steps back across the room to enter the en suite, then the dressing room, and close the door behind me. “My name is Isla Reyes. I filed a report in October 2010 and was wondering if I could speak to the officer it was assigned to.”
“What’s the officer’s name?” Officer DeTorio queries dismissively.
“James Miller,” I answer, then pause to check my hand for the case number that I wrote on my palm. “The case number is 103—”
“Please hold.”
“Oh. Okay. Th—”
The line clicks into a recording of general public safety information, and I sit down on the green, velvet chaise lounge positioned in the center of the dressing room. The recorded voice continues for about a minute and a half before the line clicks into another connection.
“Miss Reyes,” another man answers. “Officer Miller speaking. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, hi.” I pause, briefly at a loss for words. “I filed a report in October 2010 and you were the—”
“Yes, ma’am, I know the case,” he says in a get-to-the-damn-point tone, albeit one that sounds kind enough. “What can I do for you? Is everything okay?”
“Actually.” I pause yet again as stress from a number of angles grips me. “I have kind of a strange situation. I just stumbled upon the case number when I was going through old emails, and saw that it was for a stolen cell phone, and… you’ll have to pardon me, but I honestly don’t remember losing a phone or filing a police report. I’m mostly just curious what the circumstances were that—”
“Huh.” Paper shuffles in the background. “That’s interesting.”
My brow pulls low. “It is?”
“You don’t remember meeting with me and my partner?”
I shake my head. “No, sir. I apologize. There was a lot of—”
“Can you come by the station to meet with me?”
“Oh.” My stomach sinks with disappointment, which causes an aggressive surge of nausea to creep up my throat. “I’m actually out of the country. Would you be able to—”
“All right, well, when you get back, come on by, and we’ll have a chat about it, and I’ll fill you in on what I’ve got.”
I squint. “You can’t tell me about it over the phone?”
“No,” he says in a clipped, yet still kind enough tone. “With a case of this nature, I’m not gonna go over the details over the phone.”
A case of this nature?
“What was the nature of it?” I ask, knowing it’s a pointless question, but not really caring. “It’s just a stolen phone, isn’t it? Surely, there’s no reason—”
“Come on by, and we’ll talk about it,” he says, more paper shuffling. “Gimme a call when you’re back in the States, and we’ll have a little meeting.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know if—”
“Take care of yourself, Miss Reyes, and we’ll see you soon.”
The line disconnects, and I lower the phone to stare at it, and that’s when I know.