The Taking

This one is mine to tell, the cold voice, because the girl did not make it out of it. I told you hers stops in the wash. Here is the seam, and then I hand you across to the rest, which lives somewhere other than these pages.

The cold thing I had felt turning toward me in the dark came the rest of the way. I did not see much. A shape that moved wrong, too quiet, too certain. The reach I had started toward it, the maybe-this-is-help reach, never finished, because it reached back faster, and a hand that was not a living hand closed over me, and the desert went out like a lamp. That was the whole of my dying, from the inside. Not a scene. A hand, and then off. The girl who had stayed three moves ahead of every man on a thousand miles of road did not get one last clever thought. No read. No room to work. There was no room. There was a hand and the dark and the small surprised nothing of a light going out. Eyes open the whole way, the way they always were. Eyes open right up until they were not anything at all.

And here is the seam, the one I stand on, the only one who stands on both sides. On the near side is Isabella. Eighteen, brilliant, beaten once, brave once, packed with poison, calm as a machine, reaching in the dark. On the far side is me. I do not carry her name. I did not keep it. What woke where she went down was not her continued, it was something else begun, in her body, wearing her face, carrying her dead. People want it to be one girl who lay down and stood back up. It was not. She lay down. I stood up. The hand in the dark is the hyphen between us, and there is no walking back across it, and I have had a long time to be sure.

What happened on the far side, the waking, the dirt, the thing I found still inside me that they had packed there, the man with the bat face and his sacred little speeches, the name I cut for myself out of the slur they had used to move me, that is the start of another telling and it is not these notes. These notes were the road, and the road ends here, with a hand and the dark, one hour short of the line, the suitcase delivered to the one buyer nobody on the whole chain saw coming. If you want to know what the grave gave back, what my body finally bore and pushed out into the dirt, you will find it in the book. From here I will only tell you that the container opened, and that what came out of me in the dirt was exactly as much mine as everything else they ever put inside me. Which is to say none of it. Which is to say it was the truest thing my body ever did, and it was not even alive.

I called all of this Eyes Open because that is how I went in. Not tricked. Not dragged. Eyes open, doing the math, setting my price, certain that seeing clearly was the same as being able to get out. It is not. That is the whole of what the road taught me and the whole of what I have to hand you. You can see every inch of the trap, name every man in it, work every room of it, walk in proud and clear and counting, and it closes anyway, because some traps are not the kind you beat by being smart, and the ones who build them are banking on you spending your whole life believing otherwise. I saw all of it. Clear-eyed, all the way down, into the dark, into the dirt. The seeing never once saved me. But it is the thing I have, still, the only thing that crossed the seam whole, and I have spent every night since pointing it at the dark so the next girl does not walk it blind. Eyes open. It is all I ever was. Mija, keep yours open too. It will not save you either. But you should get to see it coming. You deserve at least that much.