The first three weeks, she doesn't leave her apartment.
She discovers two economy-size boxes of rice-in-a-bag stuffed in the shadowy recesses of the cupboard. They probably passed their expiration dates back when her mother was still living on her own, rattling around her busted old house like a pinball in an abandoned arcade. She eats the rice anyway, when she remembers to; she eats nothing else. The milk goes bad and then the sour cream does too, and by the beginning of the third week every absentminded opening of the fridge is met with a puff of cool, eye-wateringly rotten air that takes her breath away.
She can't remember a single thing she did in those three weeks, but she's worn a path across the living room with her pacing. She cannot stand to have the TV on: the endless circus of overblown, undeserved grief playing there made her physically ill the first and only time she tried to watch. It made her wonder how things had played out, and she doesn't want to wonder.
The mail piles up under her door.
She wakes one morning from a dream of coins flipping and spends two hours cleaning out the fridge. From there she takes on the kitchen, and then the bathroom, and then the living room. She's down to scrubbing with toilet paper and mouthwash before she gives up. Her bedroom she leaves as it is, sheets twisted into an anguished nest on bare mattress, the afghan aunt Nita made for her twenty-fifth birthday tacked over the window because the blinds let in too much daylight, her clothes strewn over dresser and floor like so much garbage. Peeling pineapple-patterned wallpaper from whatever era people thought it was a good idea to make stuff like that. The hardwood floor she'd been so thrilled about when she signed the lease is scraped and dull.
She leaves the last of her severance on the kitchen counter with the keys. She leaves the pictures of her and her mother turned facedown on the dresser. She does her best to leave her memories and her pride stuck to the walls, the floor, the shower curtain and the windows and the furniture; to scrape them off like lint and walk out unburdened. She sheds her name like a dying skin, and steps out onto the street.
She is wearing a sweater and a jacket in spite of the heat of the day, knowing she'll need these things in a few months. Maybe -hopefully- more than she's going to need the batons strapped to her thighs under her jeans.
A gun would be better, would be smarter. But every time she tries to pick hers up she sees his face, all the humanity burned out of it, nothing but rage and gristle left behind, the muzzle of the gun bigger than the goddamn moon and that awful disc turning in the air, silver to black to silver, and the breath falls out of her and she can't do it.
She's not exactly doing this with any long-term plans in mind, anyway.
##
It's not so different, being on the streets. It's colder and dirtier, and there's a lot less respect, but being invisible suits her.
The regulars in the area learned after one light headtap that she wasn't an easy mark. She stakes out her turf on Washburn and Duluth, a nook behind a little trattoria with a sympathetic cook and a pair of bull mastifs that guard the dumpster by virtue of looking terrifying and being about as mobile as wet beanbags. After a few days one of them deigns to keep her warm at night, a contact both unexpected and touching in its simple acceptance. That night she lays there in the dark listening to street fights and bar music with an ache in her throat, a furry mountain breathing beside her, and a vague sense of safety she hasn't known in so long it feels like something is cracking inside her.
The next night she moves a few inches -all she can manage in the close space of a cardboard box- away from that gigantic back and curls up shivering and alone.
She has made no friends. She doesn't want to. Sharing an oil-drum fire long enough to warm her hands up is about as close as she wants to get to anybody.
She spends her days walking. It's soothing, and it keeps her warm. Her city is so much deeper and wider than she knew. Her beat, back when she'd been new and pounding pavement, had allowed her glimpses of that labyrinthine breadth, but much, much less than she'd ever guessed. Now that she's shed every part of herself she cared for she is swallowed like a child in a forest by alleys, by crumbling warehouses and condemned buildings, and then finally by the collapsed underground, built and abandoned back when the graft and backroom handshake industrial boom of the sixties met a hard truth about digging tunnels in ledge. Even the ground here fights back.
She stops being careful at the end of her thirtieth night living in a cardboard box, marking her two-month anniversary of unemployment with a trip down into the remains of the subway system. Not caring doesn't mean fearless: her left hand is in her pocket, where a tear in the fabric lets her grip the cold hard handle of a baton, and her breath shivers in her chest. It's dark and it smells like piss and busted concrete and old anger. The tunnels are empty, forgotten before they ever became anything, and they do not hold a single memory of human ambition or human terror.
She leans against a crumbling wall and holds her breath until the echoes of her presence die away, until the faraway sound of light late traffic above and the drip of water fills her ears and hollows out her tired mind.
The cardboard was starting to fall apart anyway.
##
It's warmer underground.
The dripping noise turns out to be a busted storm drain, and while the water is not exactly clear, it's cleaner than she is. She huddles next to it in the still hour before dawn when even the traffic far above has fallen silent, and strips, soaking a corner of one blanket in the cool flow and slowly rubbing the accumulated filth of the streets from her skin. Her hands press harder and harder, dragging at her body as though she can scrub away indifference, shame, fury, fear; these things she never did quite shed, which cling to her along with every stupid, selfish act she wrought in the world, everything she fucked up, everyone she failed and oh, she failed so many.
Her name, which means merciful grace and which she distorted into broken trust, lost honor, cowardice, has followed her under the world; it's as much a part of her as the air in her lungs. It's written under the dirt on her skin, hiding in the diminished curve of her breasts, the mats in her hair. There is no place in the world, however dark and lost, where she can hide. She has been trying to achieve the impossible: invisible is a state of grace, and it's not an option for people like her. Earned, not given.
Make it right, miha, her mother whispers, echo from a time when the answer to broken things was simpler, a Hail Mary and a sorry and a week of doing extra chores. Make it better.
Nothing can make her right.
Her eyes and nose are running before she gets to her face, her chest hitching. She swallows until she can breathe and scrubs until she's raw and aching and clean, or as clean as she will ever be again, which isn't very.
She's lost close to twenty pounds. Her hands, learning the shape of her again, find new angles and hollow places. It's fascinating and awful, how fast she has become something else, how she is still herself regardless. She soaks her underwear and her tee-shirt, wrings them dry. She thinks about how to get a pot, a comb, how to build a fire, where to find a change of clothes. She would like a scarf and gloves. It's gotten cold above.
The shelter on Third opens at seven most mornings, and there will be hot cheap coffee and no questions.
##
There's a certain cadence to street beats that you learn after a few days: the walk, the way to hold your shoulders, the way to look at things. The things to pay attention to, the things you can let go.
Walking this way, looking this way, without the uniform and the authority that comes with it - that will get you killed. Her city isn't forgiving, in any sense of the word. It's on Pollard, hovering at the edges of the produce market in broad daylight, that she gets jumped for the first time.
In the space of a few seconds she learns that there are shades of invisibility after all. She cannot hide from herself, yet she cannot make herself visible, audible, important to the pedestrians passing not fifty feet from where she lies curled against herself to protect her organs, elbows over her temples. The batons are in reach, and it doesn't matter. There's nothing on her worth stealing (that they find) and it's over quickly, hands tugging at her clothes as she makes herself a ball and tries to breathe past the fire spilling from her bruised kidneys. Then there's a growl, and the hands leave just as they were starting to reach for other things, things she might, in spite of herself, still find worth defending. A dull bass roar sounds off next to her ear and she kicks herself back against the bricks, curling tighter.
Then a cold damp thing presses against her cheek, and she opens her eyes to a nose the size of a basketball above a wet red maw and teeth like yellow scissors, and she takes a breath full of rancid mastiff, and almost smiles.
He follows her down into the underground, bounding ahead, not patient with her slow, limping progress but not quite leaving her sight either. He spends the rest of the evening killing rats with bloody enthusiasm. She gives him most of her rice, and doesn't roll away this time, when he curls up next to her.
He's definitely going to need some kind of bath if this is going to be a regular thing.