Say It Until It's True

Chapter One: The Grille

I woke into a dark that had no edges.

For a long while I believed my eyes were still closed, and I lay there trying to open them, working the muscles of my face until my forehead ached. Then I understood that they were open. There was simply nothing for them to do.

The floor under me was concrete, cold as a creek stone, and it smelled the way a milk can smells when it has been left in a shed for twenty years — brine and sour cream and dust. My cheek was stuck to it. I peeled myself up and sat, and my head went light and swampy, and I had to put both hands down to keep from tipping over.

My feet were bare. That was the first fact I could hold onto. I had gone to bed in socks every night of my life since I was fourteen, and my feet were bare, and the soles were tender the way they get after a summer of going without.

The second fact was the pain in my arms. I found it by accident, hugging myself against the cold. Both elbows, the soft inside crook, had a hard little knot under the skin that shrieked when I pressed it. I pressed anyway. I pressed until my eyes watered, because pain was information, and I had almost none.

My name is Nita Hobbs, I said inside my head. I am twenty-two years old. I work the night desk at a hotel in Reno and my shift starts at eleven and Rosalie brings donuts on Fridays. I drove out to —

And there it stopped, like a road that runs into water.

I knew I had driven somewhere. I could feel the shape of the wheel in my hands. Beyond that there was a white space in me, wide and calm and clean, and when I put my attention on it, it slid away, the way a fly moves before your hand gets there.

I crawled.

The room was nine of my body lengths one way and about six the other, and I mapped it on my hands and knees with my palms out, like a woman feeling for a wall in a burning house. Cinder block, painted, the paint furred and flaking. A mattress in the corner, thin as a folded coat, with no sheet. A galvanized bucket that told me what it was for by smell alone. A drain in the center of the floor with a grate in it, and my fingers found hair in that grate, a good handful of it, dry and stiff, some of it long. I dropped it and wiped my hand on my leg and then I couldn't stop wiping my hand on my leg.

Against the north wall, low down at the height of my knee, was a grille. Steel louvers set into a frame, painted the same as the wall. When I put my face against it I felt air coming through, warmer than the cellar, carrying a whiff of cooked onion.

Someone was frying onions.

That was when I started screaming. I screamed until my throat tore, and I beat the wall with the flat of my hands, and then with the bucket, and then I sat down on the mattress and shook.

A click.

A bulb came on above me, a bare forty-watt in a wire cage, and the light was so violent that I cried out and covered my eyes. Through the cracks between my fingers I saw the room. Gray blocks. A door of raw steel with no handle on my side. A wooden shelf with a tin cup on it, and above the cup, a copper pipe with a valve. The valve dripped. There was water in the cup, an inch of it, and I got to it on my knees and drank it and it tasted like nickels and salt and it was the best thing that has ever been in my mouth.

"There she is," a woman said.

The voice came out of the grille, close and unhurried, an older woman's voice with a kind of warm burr in it, like a schoolteacher who has read to children for thirty years. It was not what I expected. That was the beginning of understanding how bad this was going to be.

"You've slept a long time," she said. "I know you're frightened. Frightened is all right. Frightened is honest."

"Where am I?" My voice came out in pieces. "Please. Please, where am I?"

"You're home," she said.

"I need a hospital. I've been — there's something in my arms, somebody put something in my arms —"

"Hush now." A chair creaked on the other side of the wall. She was sitting on the other side of the wall, and she had onions on the stove. "I'm going to ask you one question, and then I'll bring you a lamp and a blanket and something to eat. That's all. One question."

I got as close to the grille as I could. I could smell her — lavender soap, and under it, faintly, the ammonia smell of a place where an old woman has cleaned very hard for a long time.

"What's your name?" she said.

Relief went through me so fast it made me giddy. There had been a mistake. Somebody had taken the wrong girl, and now they wanted to know who I was, and when they found out they would put me in a car and drive me back to my own bed.

"Nita," I said. "Nita Hobbs. H-O-B-B-S. My brother is Cody Hobbs, he's in Fallon, he'll come get me, he'll pay whatever —"

The bulb went out.

Not a flicker. A snap, like a bone. And in the same second the drip in the copper pipe stopped, and the silence where the drip had been was so loud that I put my hand up to the valve and turned it and turned it and nothing came out but a dry click and a smell of rust.

"Wait," I said. "Wait — wait, what did I do?"

Nothing.

"Ma'am? Ma'am, please. Please. What did I say?"

The chair creaked again. Footsteps went away across a wood floor above and to the left, and a long time later I heard, very faintly, a plate set down on a table.

I don't know how long that dark lasted. I have tried to reckon it since, with lawyers and doctors helping, and the best we can do is call it thirty hours. It did not feel like hours. Time in that room was not made of hours. It was made of the drain and the mattress and the bucket, and the round trip between them, and the sound of my own tongue moving in my dry mouth.

I slept and woke and could not tell which was which. Twice I heard water running somewhere in the house, a long luxurious rush of it, and I put my forehead against the block and wept without any tears coming, which is a thing that can happen.

Then the chair creaked.

"Are you thirsty?" she asked.

"Yes." It came out as a hiss.

"I thought you might be. You've been out in the sun." A pause. Something being unwrapped. "I'll ask again, and you take your time. There's no hurry in this house. What's your name?"

I had thought about this. I had used all that dark to think about it, and I had come to a conclusion that I was proud of, in the way you can be proud of anything when you're that far down. I would not play. Whatever she wanted, whatever game this was, she needed me to open my mouth, and I would keep it shut. That was the one wall she couldn't get through.

So I said nothing.

The silence went on. I could hear her breathing. It was patient breathing, the breathing of a woman shelling peas.

"All right," she said, and there was no anger in it at all, which frightened me more than anger would have. "You think about it, honey. I'll leave you something to think with."

And she set the metronome going.

I didn't know what it was for the first minute. A small hard tick, wood and brass, coming through the grille at the pace of a slow walk. Tick. Tick. Tick. I actually laughed. I remember laughing, and thinking, is that it, is that all you've got, my mother had a clock in the hall that did worse than that.

By the first hour, my pulse had gone over to it. My heart found the tick and matched it and would not let go.

By the third hour I was counting, because counting was better than not counting, and I lost count somewhere past two thousand and had to start again, and the losing was a physical grief, like dropping a full glass.

By the fifth hour it had stopped being a sound. It was a finger, tapping the middle of my forehead. It was a nail being driven, one tap per hour, into a board that had my name written on it.

Somewhere in there I began talking to it. I told it about the hotel and the night desk and the way the lobby smelled at four in the morning. I told it about Dani, my little sister, gone fourteen months, and how the sheriff in her county had called her a runaway and closed the file with a rubber stamp, and how our mother had died two years before that with Dani's name in her mouth. I told the tick everything I had, and the tick took it all and gave nothing back.

Elsewhere in the house, life went on to that same time. I heard footsteps that hesitated outside my door and then went away. I heard a screen door bang, twice. I heard a man's boots on a porch and a low mutter of talk, and once, faintly, a girl's laugh, high and easy and pleased about something.

A girl. Laughing.

Eleven hours, they told me afterward. Eleven hours of it, and then it stopped, and the stopping was the worst part, because the room kept ticking after the metronome quit, and I understood then that it was not in the wall anymore.

"Poor lamb," said the woman kindly. "Do you want to try again?"

I opened my mouth. My lips split when I did it.

"Water," I said.

"Say your name for me, sweetheart, and there'll be water and peaches and a lamp, and I'll come in and sit with you."

I knew. Even then, even that far gone, some cold clear piece of me knew exactly what she was doing and exactly what would happen if I did it.

"Nita," I said. "Nita Hobbs."

"No," she said, with real sorrow. "There's no such person here."

And she started the metronome again.