The Part I Won't Tell You

I am not going to tell you how they took us.

Not because it is too much. Because I do not know. I have never known. I have had a long time to think about it and the thinking has produced nothing except a number of very good stories, and that is the problem with a head like mine. It will fill a hole for you. It will fill it so neatly that afterward you cannot find the seam, and then you have a memory instead of a gap, and the memory is wrong, and you will defend it to people who were actually there.

So. There is a morning in Morazán, and then there is not one. Somebody decided. I was not in the room where it was decided and neither were you, and I am not going to build that room for us both to stand in.

There is a second thing I am not going to tell you, and this one I am choosing.

I can tell you what happened to me. All of it. There will be a point somewhere in the middle where you would rather I stopped, and I am telling you now that I will not, because you can put this down and I could not.

The other girls. Babydoll, Blondie, Marigold, Rocket.

I know their pain. We talked. I felt all of it. I know their stories. I know my story.

I will not tell you theirs.

Mine was neither worse nor better. We all had our bad days, and our less bad days. But I am older, and mine can be told in ways that theirs could not.

Now.

The first place had a concrete floor with a drain in the middle of it, and the drain is not a detail I am including for effect. It is the first thing I understood about where I was. A room with a drain in the floor is a room somebody built expecting to have to wash it out.

There were nine of us in there, all girls, when I arrived and eleven by the end of that week, and I could feel every one of them.

You will want me to describe them. I cannot, really. Not the way you mean. I could tell you the shape of the fear of the girl on my left, which was thin and high and went on without stopping, the way a wire hums; and the shape of the fear of the girl by the wall, which was low and flat and had already decided something. I could tell you which of them had done this before. I could tell you which one was going to be trouble and which one had a family that would look for her, because those feel different, they feel completely different, hope and the absence of it are not remotely the same texture.

I could not tell you their faces. I was not looking at faces.

Nobody understands this part. You think it must be like sympathy, only more. It is not like sympathy. Sympathy is a decision you make from a distance about a person you can see. This was nine people’s insides arriving in mine, at once, with no address on them, and me sitting on a concrete floor at nineteen trying to work out which of the nine sets of terror in my chest had started there.

My Abuela used to put my hands where hers had been and wait, and the waiting was the lesson: one person, one pain, take your time. There was no version of that here. Here it was everybody at full volume, all of it real, all of it mine as far as my body could tell, and the only thing I could do about any of it was nothing.

Puchica. I keep making it sound like the worst part.

It was not the worst part. It was Tuesday, eventually. Everything becomes Tuesday if you give it long enough, and that is not wisdom, that is just a thing I found out.

On the second or third night one of them started praying, out loud, the whole rosary, and I felt the room change while she did it. Not calmer. The opposite. Nine people remembering at the same moment that they had been taught somebody was listening.

I did not join in.

I have told that as a brave thing once or twice and it was not. It was not principle and it was not doubt. It was that I could feel what praying was doing to her, which was helping, enormously, right up until she finished. And I could feel what the finishing did.

I decided I would rather not have the part where it stops.

It was the first real decision I made in there, and I have thought about it more than any of the others. Not because it was wise. Because it was the first time in my life I got something out of the gift instead of only paying for it, and what I got was a way to have less.

I didn’t understand yet that this was the whole curriculum. That everything they were going to do to me over the next twelve months was going to be teaching me the same lesson from a different angle, patiently, like a woman moving your hands to where hers had been.

Take this with you into the next one.

I went in able to feel nine people at once, and I thought that was the problem.