Page 63 of Exposed

You breathe in, continue. “You looked at me. ‘Ayudame,’ you said. ‘Ayudame.’”

A bolt of something hot and sharp and hard and excruciating hits me. “‘Help me.’”

I slump forward against the window, leaning against it beside you.

You look at me in our reflection, surprise on your features. “You remember?”

I shake my head. “No. No more than ever, just faint impressions, like a memory of a dream. Some things are more... visceral, like the smell of rain. The smell of wet concrete. But I just...know... what that word means.”

“Que utilizas para hablar español, creo,”you say.

You used to speak Spanish, I think.

“Si lo hice,”I respond, surprising myself.“Aún lo hago, parece.”

Yes, I did. I still do, it seems.

“I don’t know why it never occurred to me to try speaking to you in Spanish,” you say.

“Strange, indeed.”

You eye me directly then, perhaps catching the sarcasm in my tone. It was faint, but present. “You looked so... pitiful. Helpless. I picked you up. You were speaking, but it was too faintand too rapid for me to catch it. Something about your parents, I remember. Spanish is one of my weaker languages, and you were mumbling, and your accent was odd. Proper Spanish, I think, from Spain. Different from the Spanish spoken by Mexicans and other Latin Americans, which is the Spanish I know.”

“How many languages do you speak?” I ask, curious.

“Five. I know some French, but not enough to be fluent, practically speaking. English, Czech, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. I’m strongest in German and Mandarin, my Czech is old and I don’t speak it much anymore, and obviously English is my primary language now.”

Now? What does that mean? I open my mouth to ask, but you speak over me, as if you realize that you’ve given something away, engendered more questions.

“You clung to me when I picked you up. More strongly than I’d thought you capable of. Begged me to go back, go back. I caught that much. But I couldn’t figure out why. I asked you what was back there, and you became frantic. Incoherent. Screaming, thrashing. You were bleeding all over me, and I knew I had to get you to a hospital soon or you’d die. I have many skills, but dealing with injuries is not one of them. So I held on to you and carried you to the nearest hospital, which happened to be just a couple blocks away. It was where you were going, I think. Or trying to. You wouldn’t have gotten there. Not in the shape you were in. As it was, the surgeons say you barely made it. You’d been bleeding profusely for a long time.” You pause, and your eyes go vacant, unfocused, staring into memory. Something tells me you are telling me the truth. At least part of it. “I’ll never forget it. That night. Holding you in my arms. You were so frail, so slight. So young. Only sixteen, I think. Or thereabouts. Sixteen, seventeen. A girl, still. But so beautiful already. Dying, terrified, lost, and your eyes, when I set you down on the stretcher when we got to the ER, you looked upat me with those great big black eyes of yours and I just... I couldn’t walk away. Something in your eyes just caught me. Youneededme. You clung to my hand and you wouldn’t let go. I followed the medics as they wheeled the stretcher through the halls of the ER, to the operating room. They wouldn’t let me back there with you. I think they thought I was your boyfriend or husband, which was the only reason they’d let me get that far. I remember so vividly the last moment I saw you. You were twisted on the stretcher, trying to see me. Desperate for me. It was like I knew you. Like you knew me. I’d never seen you before, never met you. But I just... Ididknow you. I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t. I walked out of the hospital, but it was like there was this... thisropetied around me, and you were pulling on it, pulling me back in. So I waited in the ER waiting room for the next six hours as they worked on you.”

I believe this. I also believe you are lying about something. Not this, but something. Maybe lying by omission. I don’t know. I don’t dare ask. This is the most detail you’ve ever given me out of the thousands of times you’ve told me this story. I need this.Needit. I let you speak. Lean against the glass in silence as you talk. I feel as if I’ve been listening for a thousand years now. Logan, and now you. Hours of listening. I’m so tired, so exhausted, but I cannot turn away. Cannot turn a deaf ear to this, not when it contains truth you’ve kept so long hidden.

“They’d shaved your head.” You glance behind, at your phone on the arm of the chair. Retrieve it.

I watch as you swipe across the screen, press your thumb to the circular button, and a plain black background appears. No, not black. Stars. Speckles of silver, a constellation. Which one, I don’t know, can’t tell. You tap on a white icon with a multicolored rosette, like a flower made of all primary colors in an overlapping wheel. Photos appear. You tap a button nearthe top, and the photo icons get smaller, multiply, arrange themselves by year. You scroll down so the photos move backward in time. I catch your face, a car, snow, a painting, me, me, me, in states of undress, asleep, not looking at you, clasping my bra behind my back, head turned in profile. So many photos of me. None of Rachel, none of Four or Six or anyone else. Just me. Tiny little squares of color like a mosaic, a composition of me. You scroll down, down, down through the years. To 200—not 2009. You touch the row of photos so fast I almost doubt what I saw, and they expand, organized now by location, some from New Jersey, most from various boroughs of New York City. More scrolling through the photos from that year, until you find one.Theone. Me, again. So young. My god, so young.

I barely recognize myself. My face is battered. Scratches. Cuts. Bruises. So thin. Delicate-looking, birdlike frailty. My head is shaved down to black stubble, highlighting the contours of my skull and the high sharpness of my cheekbones and the almond shaped width of my eyes. There is a bright, wicked, reddish-pink scar on my scalp, on the left side, crossed by jagged black threads. I am looking at you. At the camera, the phone. Not smiling, just staring. Wide eyed and curious.

I do not remember this. But I am staring at you. I am lying in a bed. The frame of the photograph contains a bit of silver rail, pillow, some blue fabric, probably the hospital gown. How can you have taken this photograph of me, looking so fresh, so candid?

“You came out of the initial surgery just fine. Woke up after, everything seemed fine. I snapped this. You remembered me. We didn’t really talk, just sat together. Then the nurses kicked me out, saying you needed to sleep. And when I came back the next day, you were gone. They said something had gone wrong during the night. Swelling in your brain. They had to doemergency surgery, put you in a medically induced coma. You didn’t wake up from it for six months.”

I take the phone from you and stare at myself. The younger me. As if I could find clues to my past, to my former self in this digital photograph, nothing but pixels, nothing but ones and zeroes. I cannot. I do not see myself in this. I see a girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Lost and alone, trying to be defiant. Staring up at a camera held by the man who’d saved me, unhappy but daring. Brave, but scared. I see this. Did I know then that my parents were dead? Did I even have a chance to mourn? Or did the bleeding in my brain steal that from me as well?

I cannot get over the way I appear in the photo. My head shaved, how it highlights my eyes and cheekbones, the delicate but somehow strong shape of my head. I look a little masculine, but I am yet somehow unmistakably female. Involuntarily, I run my hand over the top of my head, almost expecting to feel stubble.

Could I?

What would it feel like? To feel nothing but scratchy stubble and scalp? No hair, no long thick black tresses.

I could do it. Perhaps I will.

Perhaps to truly become Isabel, I must shave my head and regrow my hair once more. Cut away the coiffured, styled, curled, brushed perfect locks of Madame X and become Isabel, a new woman, rebirthed and fresh and raw.

You turn in place. Take your phone back, shut it off, toss it aside carelessly. It lands on the seat of the armchair and bounces once. You are looking down at me. You take my braid in your hand, tug my head back. You are standing close, not quite touching. Towering over me. Blocking out all the world with your muscled bulk, and I smell you. Feel your heat.

Anger flushes through me. I push you away, but you do not let go of my hair, and I must return to you or suffer the pain. “Letgo, Caleb.” I accept the pain and continue to push away.