Sarah pushed open the door of the hospital—cold glass and stainless steel—and concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other. Slowly, slowly, she made her way to the car she had parked there the day before. It had been a relatively simple procedure, the pain of which was still fogged in her mind by the drugs they had given her.
She fingered a knife in her pocket as she felt the eyes of the dirty men planting trees in the parking lot medians. She didn't like their dark eyes, didn't like their skin, burned and browned from the sun, didn't like their crooked teeth or the harsh quality of their syllables as they spoke to each other, laughed. That male laughter sent chills down her spine and made her jaw tighten with both fear and anger. The hot sun beat down though it was only midmorning. It would be hotter later.
The dry Western heat was something entirely different from the rain of her childhood memories. Rain…. It rained here, sometimes. Not often.
When she ran from the place of her birth, all Sarah had wanted was a foreign city, a foreign house where nobody dared question how she had changed, where no one narrowed their eyes and whispered about that Williams girl. She had heard it all. She didn't want to hear it any more.
The public hospital didn't keep close tabs on its patients. That was why Sarah had driven into the barrio instead of keeping to the parts of town where she felt safe. The cracked cement always made her nervous, the black and red and blue paint in garbled letters sprayed on the wall made her afraid, but she didn't show it. She had not been hassled yet, but there were reasons for that. Gone now. She would have to be more careful. The switchblade in her pocket made her feel more secure.
Sarah drove slowly, the little Jeep that had been a guilt present from her father as dependable as always. It had carried her across too many state lines for her to count, across the Bible Belt and the plains, across the barren Badlands, across sandy desert, finally to this place, not a mecca but at least someplace where people lived, where there was life, where she could start again.
The savings from babysitting and other odd jobs had landed her a tiny house for rent in a quiet neighborhood. It wasn't in a part of town where people watered their lawns, but they were miles away from anywhere that chickens scratched in the dust. The yards were fenced with chain link—economic, responsible, clean. Sarah liked the otherworldliness of the thick stucco, the low arched doorways, the red tile patio out back, the red tile roof. She didn't mind that rattlesnakes and scorpions lived in the shale pile out in the back of her house. She never went back there anyway. It was too hot outside. She saw little girls and little boys outside playing with no shirts on, dancing in the backyard plastic pools in just their underwear, and she smiled. Never in her neighborhood back home would girls be allowed to do that. Even at five, six years old their bodies were things to hide.
She couldn't waitress, couldn't be a secretary, couldn't even earn money in the ways she refused to earn it. So she started cooking at a little New England restaurant, hidden away in the back, where her fingers could do what they knew how to do. Here Mexican restaurants went out of business every day when half the population could cook better than the restaurants. Here down-home cooking meant tortillas and carne asada, tacos piled high with meat and lettuce and tomato, tamales cooked in the corn husk. Everything smelled of lime, salsa, frying corn oil. Here, simple things like chowder and fat baked potatoes with sour cream, butter, chives, were the exotic. A New England restaurant did very well.
On the weekends Sarah slept, sometimes watched TV, and played with her landlady's pottery wheel. She would never achieve the level of skill that the women who set out blankets and displayed their wares on the roadside did, but kicking the wheel rhythmically and feeling the damp earth mold against her fingers was soothing. It soothed the mounting fear which always seemed to clutch at her throat. It soothed her thoughts of the future. It soothed her aching heart, soothed her bitter memories of rejection. It soothed the rumblings within her.
Nobody asked for her story. Half of them would not have understood it anyway, her language being the language of the rich in El Cajon, her new town. El Cajon, just minutes from San Diego. El Cajon, where the street signs ran in both Spanish and English, where the language of the construction workers was foreign to her and the telephone operator's voice was too thickly accented to understand. Nobody asked for her story because they already knew it, already knew what so many others had said before. Some spoke of betrayal, others of misunderstanding. Some, like Sarah, wept for what they had never had in the first place. All had the same haunted look in their eyes—you can't go home again. Most wasted away.
It had been on the long side of half a year since Sarah had last laughed. That was the day the mind-numbing pain had sent her to the public hospital, to the barrio she feared so. That was the day she left part of herself there, the part she swore she didn't want, the part that was tainted. Could never be good.
Yet still, it was the hardest thing she had done to walk out those hospital doors that day. Well, the second hardest. Running here, running toward her new life, had been easy. A duffel bag of clothes, some food to start out with, pulling out onto the highway, and then nothing but days of blacktop and nights of headlights. She knew she had pulled off at rest stops and slept sometimes, but she did not remember consciously doing so. Just as she could no longer remember the pain, the tearing pain…. She had screamed, but now she could not remember it.
Sarah's stoic face didn't even register as she pulled into her own driveway, turned off the ignition, and stumbled out of her car. She fumbled the door open, locked it twice behind her, and made it to her bed before collapsing. She buried her head in her arms, long silky hair trailing down her back and over her shoulders. She pressed her face against the cool sheets—too hot for comforters or blankets—and wondered how long it would take for her body to warm the bed. She almost passed out. She did not cry.
