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She wakes to a hand on her shoulder, a gruff one, a man's hand, shaking her awake. A light so bright she can't make a thing out, only voices, two of them, ordering her to stand up. She is on the beach, her hand clutching at wet sand. Her eyes adjust and she sees them: two men in uniform. Father figures, she thinks. She smiles up at them. They don't smile back. Bad daddies. She says something out loud, but it sounds more garbled than what she had in her head. They grab her, one arm and then the other, not at the armpit, but by the wrists, as though she were just a kid. Swing me around and around and around and around. But it hurts, the joints are no longer loose; they are fixed in place. You're hurting me, she says, this time clearly. I'm not doing anything wrong. They point to the empty beer cans, more of them than she can remember drinking. She tries to explain: there were men in the hostel, she was just waiting for them to fall asleep. She is sitting in the back seat of their car now, hands cuffed. They have forgotten to put her seat belt on. The metal beneath the seat hits her tailbone, a familiar, pummeling beat. She has never been this cold, this brittle, her entire body caught up in a single spasm. I'm still scared, she says, at the door of the hostel: a giant mouth, gaping open. She begs the fat officer to take her inside, sit with her until she falls asleep, but he tells her, Grow up, lady, and takes his leave. Inside, all the men are sleeping, quiet as babies. She falls asleep quickly. When she wakes, she looks around and all the men are already gone.
The men are here for the season: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. Three of them are working on a house. The house is so big, she hears one of them say in Spanish, you could fit my whole village inside of it.
They are kind, concerned for her. They say, Güera, qué pasó? pointing to her clothes, her shoes. She tells them, Nada, nothing has happened. They let her in on their talk. She likes being near them; she understands one in five words, this is enough.
She is like a ball being passed from one set of hands to another, none of them holding on for too long. In the communal kitchen, one offers her tortillas with beans, the other spaghetti from a can; another gives her cookies mortared with jam and vanilla cream. In the mornings, she wakes with them before dawn. They eat white bread slick with margarine, and make her Nescafé their special way: they heat the milk and let the granules dissolve, then add two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. The older one says: Mija, tienes que comer, and makes her eat a second piece of Wonder Bread sloppy with supermarket jelly.
One evening, she sees a few of the men huddled around the kitchen table, hunched over the cracked screen of a phone. In miniature, she makes out a penis sliding between two breasts as taut and playful as helium balloons. They turn the screen off as soon as they see her. They disperse, scatter back into the dormitory.
The young one asks her: Cómo te llamas? She tells him without much thought: Nada. She likes it as a name, Nada. The girls who work at the reception desk think it's strange: how much time she spends with the men, sitting and biting her nails, not talking at all. One morning, she finds her few clothes at the foot of her bed, folded and washed.
Sometimes, in the evenings, they watch a movie on the small television hanging from the ceiling. They all have to crane their necks to see the tiny men on the screen dangling from helicopters and saving women from burning buildings. Sometimes when she gets bored by the action, she walks around and picks up their empty beer cans, rinses them, arranges them neatly by the bin.
For the first time in her life, she does not dream.
In the middle of the night, she hears the young one in his bed. His moans are so low and muffled, she feels as though they are coming from her, a rush of blood in her own veins, a throbbing at her own throat. Not so long ago, she might have slipped out of bed, slid her hand between his legs and told him: Let's try this instead. The sound makes way for another, not sex but slow, withheld sobs, those of a much littler boy. Her body is stiff with remorse. She has no rounded edges anymore, no warmth to proffer him.
Excerpted from Tides by Sara Freeman. Copyright © 2022 by Sara Freeman. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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