Chapter Eight — The Invitation

Six weeks after Galicia, on a Thursday at ten past eleven at night, Jon was at the kitchen table of the family flat in Madrid with a small brush in his hand and the half-painted plastic soldier that had been on his table in April, because he had picked it up again, and because he had not yet decided what to do about the sleeves. The lamp was on. The rest of the flat was dark. He had eaten at a place around the corner at eight and had come home and had opened a beer and had not drunk it, and the beer was now warm, and he was listening, without meaning to, for a sound he had been listening for on and off since the plane had come back over Madrid on the Sunday.

The phone rang.

He did not, as he picked it up, know that it was her. He had thought about her perhaps four times a day in the six weeks, in the low way a man thinks about a number he has been asked to hold in his head and has agreed to.

"¿Sí?"

"Jon."

Her voice was the voice he knew, but it was in a register he had not heard. It was not composed. It was not the opposite of composed. It was the voice of a composed person who was coming out of a room in which she had, for the first time in some period of years, shouted.

"Maribel."

"I am in the street," she said. "I am at the corner of your street. I did not know where else."

"Come up."

"I have a bag."

"Come up."

She hung up.

#

He met her at the door.

She had the grey travel coat. She had one small suitcase, not the canvas bag from Galicia but a harder shell, the kind of suitcase a person bought for a single longer trip and then kept. Her face was the face from the bar — careful — but her mouth was set in a way that had not been in the bar. Her hair had come down on one side.

"Come in," Jon said.

She came in.

He closed the door.

He did not, in the ninety seconds that followed, know what to do with his hands. He took the suitcase out of her hand and set it down against the wall. He took her coat, which she did not resist, and hung it on the hook. He brought her through to the kitchen.

He poured her a glass of wine. She did not drink.

"What happened," he said.

She was quiet for a long beat. Then she said, very slowly, the words of a person choosing each one:

"He said I had stolen from the register."

"Your boss."

"Yes."

"Had you."

"No."

"He fired you."

"He fired me. He said I would not be paid for the last two weeks. He said that the two weeks would be kept to cover what was missing."

"How much was missing."

"Nothing," she said. "Nothing was missing. There was nothing missing to cover."

Jon nodded. He did not speak for a minute.

"What did you do."

She looked at him.

"I told him," she said, "that if he did not pay me the two weeks I would come back to that bar with some friends of mine from the place I used to work in the south before this, and that we would not be friendly."

"Did you mean it."

"I do not have friends from the place in the south."

"Did he know that."

"He did not know that."

She lifted the wine glass. She put it down without drinking.

"He called a man from the door. He walked me out. I had my bag under the counter. I took it. The other girls looked at me and did not speak. I walked to the end of the street. I stood there for an hour. I did not know where to go. I went back for my suitcase to the place where I lived with two other girls. The other girls were asleep. I packed what I could carry. I walked to the bus. The bus was the last bus. I have been on buses for two hours. I did not know where to go."

"You came here."

"I came here."

"Maribel."

She looked at the glass.

"I am not asking to stay," she said. "I am telling you that I did not know where to go."

"Stay."

"Jon—"

"Stay. Tonight. As long as you need. We will sort it tomorrow."

She did not answer.

She drank, finally, half the glass of wine in three slow swallows. She set it down.

"Thank you," she said.

"De nada."

"Jon."

"Yes."

"I am not a person who is thanking you in the way a person thanks someone they owe. I am thanking you in the way a person thanks someone whose name they are going to remember."

"Okay."

"I need you to know the difference."

"Okay."

She did not drink any more of the wine.

#

He made up the spare room for her. She did not sleep in it. She sat on the edge of his bed, in the blue of the city light through the shutters, and she said, very quietly, Not tonight for this. Tomorrow perhaps. Not tonight, and Jon had said, I know, and had pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, and had lain down at the far edge of the mattress, and had gone to sleep inside twenty minutes in a way that surprised him, because he had not expected to sleep, and because the presence of another body in his bed was not a thing he had trusted for a decade.

#

Maribel did not sleep.

She lay on her side in the blue of the city light and watched the man beside her go to sleep. He went to sleep the way men went to sleep, which was to say in a few stages and then all at once, and his breath, when he was gone, was the slow even breath of a person who trusted the room he was in.

She had never been in a room with a man sleeping that she had trusted. She had been in rooms, and she had been in them with men, and she had been in them with men who had slept; and the rooms had not been rooms she had trusted, and the sleep of the men in them had been a thing to time.

She reached her hand, in the dark, to the edge of the suitcase she had set at the foot of the bed. She had, in the suitcase, beneath the second layer of clothes, the card Don Jesús had given her in the bar in April, and a second card she had collected from a professor at the public university in Madrid whose open office hours she had been attending for nine months, and a small brown envelope containing in cash the remaining twelve hundred euros of the savings she had come into the country with, and a falsified bank statement she had made, herself, at an internet café, on the morning she had understood that no one was coming.

She took her hand away from the suitcase.

She looked at Jon.

He was, in the city light, a man of a particular age who had been dealt a particular hand and had played it in a particular way. He was a generous man. Generous men were not always easy. They were easier than the stingy ones. She had known this, in the bar, from the first evening he had come in.

She thought, for the first time in some weeks, about a chair in a kitchen at the end of a long yard, and about a man who had told her what she was going to be.

She thought, for the first time in her life, about the word no as a sentence, whole, without any other word behind it.

She had said no to the men in the bar. She had said no to the officers at the border. She had said no to the women who had lived with her in the flat near the river, when they had invited her out. She had said no to a man who had held her elbow too long in a club in the north of the city, in a night out she had not wanted to go on, eighteen months ago. She had not, in any of those no's, been choosing.

She looked at the suitcase at the foot of the bed.

She thought: Never again.

She thought: Never again will a man walk me out of a room where I have been paid to stand. Never again will a woman behind a counter ask me for papers I have had to make myself. Never again will I be the one who is standing when the door is locked behind her. I will be the one who locks the door.

She did not move.

She looked at the ceiling.

The city light was blue. The man beside her was sleeping the sleep of a man who had, eight hours earlier, picked up the half-painted figure he had put down in April, because he had been waiting, in a way he had not admitted to himself, for her to call.

She lay in the blue. She did not sleep.

"Never again," she thought.

And then, because she was a person who made lists, she began to make one.