Yesterday, she’d gotten into a fight with someone in an adjoining room.
She went back to cut the woman’s hair off in the night.
She shuffles down the food line and then settles into a table on the far corner of the room. I’m not upset about that in the least.
I’m almost too exhausted to care, though. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Each night, I hear every creak, noise, snore, and nightmare from the other women in the shared room. Sleep is elusive.
Quite apart from them, I have to wake up every three hours to feed Phoenix. I’m so worried that his crying will wake them up and piss them off that I spend most nights tip-toeing along the line between sleep and consciousness, jumping to attention at Phoenix’s slightest stir.
The lack of sleep is really starting to weigh on me. This will be my fourth night at the shelter and it’s still pretty early, but already my eyelids are heavy with exhaustion.
Phoenix lets out a sharp cry and Tonya winces as though someone’s just knifed her.
“Stop being dramatic,” I tell her.
We’ve fallen into an easy and unexpected friendship, though I knew better than to categorize it as that to Tonya.
“That sound makes me want to pull my ears right off,” she says.
I roll my eyes again and force the pacifier into Phoenix’s mouth. He’s been rejecting it for the last hour, but now, he finally accepts it and quiets down a little.
“Jesus, finally,” Tonya says. “Why the fuck didn’t you do that before?”
“I tried.”
“All right, all right,” she says, holding her hands up as though I’m brandishing a gun in her direction. “Don’t bite my head off.”
I take another mouthful of soup-soaked bread and sway a little from side to side in the hopes of coaxing Phoenix to sleep.
His eyes are tired but he just keeps staring up at me stubbornly.
“Suit yourself,” I whisper to him, running my finger across his cheek.
“Tonya?” I ask cautiously. “What happened with your daughter?”
She looks down at her now-empty soup bowl. “Gave her up for adoption,” she says. “The closed kind. Nice couple. Fucking picture perfect. That’s the whole reason I picked them. Apparently, they’d been trying for ages to have a baby and it never happened for them. Fucked up.”
“What was?”
“Dunno,” Tonya says with a shrug. “The whole fucking situation. People like them who have their shit together and can’t have a baby. And then there’s people like you and me. Lives are shot to shit. Can’t hardly take care of our own damn selves, much less a little rugrat. And we still end up knocked up. Don’t have two pennies to rub together, but we got babies. That’s what’s fucked up.”
The ring I’ve hidden in my bra pricks me right on cue. The diamond is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.
And yet, I can’t bring myself to sell it.
I can’t bring myself to let go of the one last thread that ties me to the past.
“I used to have my shit together,” I say.
“Oh yeah?” Tonya asks. “Had yourself a man?”
I see Artem’s six-foot-three frame in my mind’s eye so clearly that for a second it’s as if he’s just walked through the door.
Then I blink and his image fades, leaving me feeling cold and lonely.
“Yeah,” I reply shortly.
“He left you?”