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We found Graciella lying on bare concrete, beside an old steel tool bench. She had been badly beaten. Her clothing was shredded. But the detail I focused on was her guitar, which lay in splinters.
I closed my eyes.
I stood there refusing to open my eyes again, swaying slightly, feeling as if the ground was moving beneath me.
“She should get out of this place,” Haarm said.
“They aren’t done with her,” I said. I don’t know how I knew that. Maybe it was something in the men’s voices, the loud way they cheered the game on TV, the aggressive way they slammed their bottles down when their team scored. I don’t know. I only knew that they had not finished with her.
“I don’t want to see,” I said.
“You better toughen up, sweetie,” Haarm said.
I did not plan what happened next. I’m not proud of it.
But I’m not ashamed either.
I turned and punched the blond boy in the stomach. It wasn’t a very hard punch, I’m not very big, and I’ve never punched anyone before.
Haarm yelled something in Dutch, then switched back to English, and tried to laugh it off. He shot a look at Messenger as if expecting Messenger to discipline me.
Messenger might almost not have noticed, except that Messenger notices everything. He did not smile, but neither did he frown or show any concern.
I don’t think he liked Haarm very much. And just then, neither did I.
“Sorry,” I lied.
Time sped forward and now we were outside the shop as Graciella stepped out onto the street, holding her clothing together with her hands, shuffling like a very old woman, makeup a black smear running from her eyes, blood caked in her hair.
I hoped she would go to the police. I was disappointed when she did not. She borrowed a woman’s cell phone to call her parents and I listened to only one side of the conversation with her mother. Her useless, blind, clueless mother who had done nothing to save her from the dem
on that was her father.
“It’s me. I need to come home. I really need to come home.”
A pause.
“I spent all the money I had. Mom, I need to come home. I really, really need to come home, okay?”
A longer pause. Graciella was weeping, sobbing into the phone.
“No, I don’t want to talk to Dad. No, no, Mom, no, I—”
She swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut. Her voice was cold now. Emotionless.
“Dad, I need money to come home.”
Pause.
“Will I behave myself? I . . . What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
The woman who had loaned her the phone was looking sympathetic but also impatient. She stood a few feet away, trying to give Graciella privacy, but also obviously worried that this damaged young woman would steal her phone.
“Dad, I . . . I just need enough money to . . .”
This time the pause went on for a long time. Only slowly did I realize that her father had hung up on her.
Graciella let her hand drop to her side. The woman who owned the phone gently took it from Graciella’s hand. Then she opened her purse, pulled out a ten dollar bill, and pressed it into Graciella’s hand, mumbled something kind, and walked away, using her sleeve to wipe Graciella’s tears from her cell phone.
