And it reminded her of the text she’d received an hour earlier. The message waiting for her response.
“I’m going up,” she said. “What’s the new girl’s name? And what room?”
“Dana. Second room on the left.”
Cessy walked up the creaky narrow stairs, holding on to a loose banister with chipped white paint. The stairs led to a narrow hall with faded, flat brown carpet. Two doorways were on her right, two on her left, the halls bookended by small, outdated bathrooms. Baltimore’s Halfway House for Victims of Sex Trafficking, Domestic Violence, and Other Forms of Modern Human Slavery did many good things, but no one would call it luxurious.
Cessy walked to Dana’s room, heard the whispers of televisions from the three other rooms in the hall. This was one of the few hours the residents had to themselves.
She knocked. A mattress creaked. Footsteps approached the door.
“Who is it?”
The voice was deeper than Cessy would have guessed.
“Cessy Castillo. I’m a friend of Rose.”
The door opened. A tall, thin young black man peered at Cessy from behind square-framed glasses.
Cessy glanced past him, confused.
“Looking for a woman?” he asked.
“Well, yeah. Rose didn’t tell me.” Cessy thought back to their conversation. “Or correct me.”
His caution broke into a smile. “What’s in the bag?”
“Chips, Coke.”
“When you say Coke, you mean …?”
“Nice try.”
“Eh, come in anyway.” He stepped back and let Cessy in his room. “Sorry, I haven’t done much with the place.”
A bed in the corner, a narrow writing desk under a window on the other side, a small closet, an outdated television mounted on a stand. A poster on the wall dictated the house rules:
No drinking, no drugs.
No fighting or stealing.
Think: Would an asshole do this? Then don’t.
Cessy pulled out the chair from the writing desk. “You could ‘guy’ it up. Put up some posters of topless chicks on motorcycles, that sort of thing.”
Dana made a face. “Yeah, that sort of thing isn’t really my sort of thing.”
Cessy grinned. She reached into the shopping bag, pulled out a Coke, handed him one, opened one for herself. They both drank deeply. She savored how the soda sizzled down her throat.
Cessy opened the chips. “How do you like the place?”
“I mean, it’s okay,” Dana reached for a handful. “Better than where I was. Rose seems cool. Maybe a little strict.”
“Maybe?”
“I can’t complain, right? Got free food, a free bed, so she can make whatever rules she wants.” He stuffed the potato chips in his mouth.
“You been in a place like this before?”
“Not a house like this. But I just got out of rehab.”
She glanced at his arms. “You don’t have tracks.”
“Alcohol. Mainly.” Dana didn’t elaborate. Cessy could sense him retreating back into his shell.
“The food here sucks though, right?” Cessy asked. “Rose is a shitty cook.”
Dana nodded.
“Sorry I asked about your past.” Cessy offered a smile. “I’m not a trained counselor or doc, so I don’t really know what I’m doing with these conversations.”
“Then why are you here?”
“My mom was on the streets.”
“Working?”
“That’s right.” Cessy paused, thought again about the text message waiting for her response. “It really messed me and my brother up.”
Cessy leaned over her crossed legs, paused.
She had to speak carefully here. This always affected her, and Cessy had learned that whatever she said needed to be like a pebble skipping over a lake.
If she lingered, she risked slipping under the surface.
Cessy couldn’t risk remembering what she and her brother had done. If she did, she’d drown.
“My brother and I went separate ways after our mom died,” she said. “I moved here, ended up in group counseling. That’s where I met Rose. She asked me to start coming here about a year ago.”
“To what, check up on everyone? See who she’ll have trouble with?”
Cessy touched her throat as if she could smooth away the lump, the memory of her mother. “I don’t know how to tell who she’ll have trouble with. Most of the people who come here are scared. Desperate. The only trouble they cause is when they sneak out and leave. Rose doesn’t let them back.”
“That’s what I mean. Strict.” Dana ate a chip, and his face softened. “How’s Rose afford this place anyway?”
“She made a ton of money in the nineties dot-com boom. Got out before it went bust, invested it, and those investments paid off. Now she runs this place.”
“The nineties?”
“She’s not exactly young. Anyway, that’s my story. What’s yours?”
“My grandfather wouldn’t stop sleeping with me. Never ended until I ran away.”
Cessy wanted to ask more but didn’t. Just ate some chips and waited.
“I ended up dating different men. A couple of them put me on the street.”
“Said they needed money, right?”
“Exactly.” Dana munched for a moment. “Didn’t take long for them to turn from boyfriends to pimps.”
They ate in silence, both lost in their past, each wondering how much to share. Cessy hadn’t lied about anything she’d said, including being new at this. She didn’t have formal training or instructions. Rose just wanted her to talk to new arrivals.
Cessy had never been sure why Rose had singled her out, why she had taken her aside after one of the meetings in the basement of that church on Light Street, asked her to come by her house. And Cessy wasn’t sure why she’d gone, how she’d ended up sitting at a table with Rose and a young newcomer to the home. The newcomer had come to the house recalcitrant, reluctant, but ended up talking with Cessy, the two of them soon laughing.
Cessy often felt like everything she did was still with the hope of escaping what she’d left when she first came to Baltimore. And maybe that was why new residents of the house opened up to her. They sensed a fellow runaway.
Or maybe they sensed that Cessy was still running, and they needed that. The comfort of knowing everything was temporary, because permanence had been a nightmare.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket, glanced down at the screen.
“I need to take this.”
Cessy left the bedroom, headed down one of the halls to a communal bathroom. Closed and locked the door behind her.
Read the text again. It was the same one she’d received earlier.
You decided what to do?
She didn’t recognize the number, but knew who the message was from.
The blond man who’d come to her apartment about the money Hector owed.
He was done waiting.
CHAPTER
9
DEB GAVE UP on reading, set the Anne Tyler novel on her garden bench. Fault didn’t lie with the author; it was hard for Deb to concentrate on anything without grief slipping through like cold air through a window crack.