After My Lover Saved Her, He Let Me Burn

The bench was cold under me. I did not move.

I had been sitting outside the laundromat for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. The numbers on the parking meter blurred when I looked too long, so I stopped looking. A plastic bag drifted past my shoes. Someone inside the laundromat was laughing at a TV. The dryers hummed through the wall, low and steady, like something breathing.

I did not know my name. I did not know how I got here. I knew the cold. I knew that the right side of my face hurt when the wind hit it. I knew that if I touched it, the skin felt wrong, ridged and tight. So I did not touch it.

A woman was walking down the street toward me.

She was wearing a long coat that did not belong on this block. Camel, soft, too clean. Her boots clicked on the sidewalk. She was holding something in her gloved hand, close to her chest, like it might blow away. A photograph.

She stopped halfway down the block. Then she started walking again, faster. Then she was running.

I watched her come. I did not feel afraid. I did not feel anything. The part of me that knew how to feel afraid had been switched off a long time ago, and no one had turned it back on.

She stopped in front of the bench. Her breath came out in white clouds. She looked at me, then at the photograph, then at me again. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Then her face folded.

I had never seen a person break like that. Her knees gave a little. She caught herself on the back of the bench. Her shoulders started shaking, and a sound came out of her that did not have a shape. She pressed her glove against her mouth like she was trying to push the sound back inside.

"Reina," she said.

The word landed on me and slid off.

"Reina, it's me. It's Tiffany. Oh my God. Oh my God."

I looked at her. I looked at the photograph in her hand. A girl with long dark hair was laughing in it. The girl had two whole sides to her face.

"I don't know you," I said. My voice sounded rusty. I was not sure when I had last used it.

She nodded fast, wiping her cheeks with the back of her wrist. "That's okay. That's okay. You don't have to. Just come with me. Please. It's so cold out here."

I did not have a reason to say no. I did not have a reason to say yes. I stood up because she was holding out her hand and her hand was shaking, and somewhere far underneath everything that had been emptied out of me, a small thing remembered that you were supposed to take a hand when it shook like that.

Her apartment smelled like coffee and clean laundry. She kept apologizing for things I did not understand. She set a bowl of soup in front of me and watched me eat it with her hands pressed flat on the table. When I finished, she filled it again without asking. I ate that one too.

That night she left a lamp on in the corner of the guest room. I lay on top of the blankets with my shoes still on and watched the lamp until the window turned gray.

Days passed. I am not sure how many.

She did not push me. That is the thing I remember most about those first days. She did not ask me where I had been. She did not ask about my face. She made tea. She put a blanket over my shoulders. She said small, unimportant things in a soft voice, like a person talking to a bird that had flown into a kitchen.

She showed me photographs. A tall building with ivy. A girl in a graduation gown. Two girls in a dorm room with their tongues out. I looked at all of them politely. None of them were anyone.

On the fourth day, the television was on in the living room. Some daytime show. I was sitting on the floor by the radiator because the radiator was warm and I had not been warm in a long time. Tiffany was in the kitchen.

A man on the screen laughed.

It was not a long laugh. It was a half second, maybe less. A short, low, surprised sound, the kind a person makes when something catches them off guard and they have not had time to perform a better laugh.

My hand went to my chest before I knew it was moving.

Something pulled, hard, behind my ribs. Like a hook had been there the whole time and someone had finally yanked the line.

I made a small noise. I did not mean to.

Tiffany came around the corner so fast she almost fell. She knelt down in front of me. She did not touch me. She had learned not to touch me.

"What is it," she said. "Reina. What did you feel."

"I don't know." My eyes were wet. I had not cried in any of the days I could remember. "I don't know. The laugh. The man. I don't."

She nodded slowly. Her own eyes were wet too, but she was holding it together for me. I could see her holding it together. "Okay," she said. "Okay. That's a start. That's a start, sweetheart."

That night she sat with me on the couch and put on an old song. Acoustic, quiet, a man's voice I almost knew. She watched my face the whole time without pretending not to.

The next morning she put a photograph in front of me. Not one of me. A different one.

A boy on a park bench. Maybe twenty, maybe a little older. He had a duffel bag at his feet that looked like it held everything he owned, because it did. His hair was too long. His coat was thin. He was looking up at whoever was taking the picture like he could not believe she was still standing there.

My hand started shaking.

I saw my own hand in the memory before I saw anything else. A paper coffee cup, steam coming off the lid. I was holding it out to him. It was raining a little. I remember thinking he should drink it before it got cold.

"His name," I said, and my voice cracked in the middle of the word. "His name was."

Tiffany did not say it for me. She waited.

"Gideon," I whispered.

The tears came up out of me like something that had been held under for a long time. They were not bitter tears. That was the strange part. They were warm. They were the tears of a girl handing a cold boy a cup of coffee and watching his hands close around it like she had given him the whole world.

I put my face in my hands and cried for a boy on a bench. I cried because I had loved him. I could feel the loving, full and bright and whole, the way you feel a room you used to live in.

And underneath the loving, somewhere I could not yet see, something else was waiting. Something with teeth.

Tiffany put her arm around me. She did not say anything. She just held on, the way a person holds the rope when the other person is climbing up out of a well.

"It's okay," she said finally, into my hair. "Remember the good parts first. The good parts come first."

I cried harder, because the way she said it told me everything.

The good parts were not the only parts.