You're exhausted. You've been back home a little over a week, if you can call the opulent suite home, but you still feel the prison under your fingernails. You've been in jail more times than you can count now, and you learned how to survive inside years earlier, when the prostitution collars came so close together that jail was a familiar reprieve from the streets. You got arrested a lot in that first year and you think that, in their own way, the police were trying to help you then. Jail meant three meals a day, a doctor, and a roof for a heavily pregnant girl with no home of her own. But even still, you never stopped hating being inside. It brought back memories of the boy you left behind, and you could never handle that.
But you've been out for over a week, and you can't stand being home. It's just you and your cousin there, and you've taken to avoiding the place as much as you can. The only person you actually want to talk to hasn't been in touch in weeks, since before the arrest, and talking to other people is something you have no interest in doing. Without him, it's all just going through the motions, and you're starting to think life is going to continue in this fashion forever. It serves you right, you think, and you can see bruises on a tiny body whenever you close your eyes. Maybe he decided he can't ever forgive you. You know that you can't ever forgive yourself.
You're heartsore as you push open the door, and it's that ache that leads you to your cousin's door, which is open in seeming invitation. But she's asleep on the bed, and you think it's good that she's managing to rest. It's been hard for her here, and when you cross the room it's to check the stitches you tugged through the skin of her arm before being arrested.
The Polaroids are clutched lovingly in her hand while she sleeps, and you forget to breathe. Shock, betrayal, confusion, they all smash you in the chest like a hammer, the pain the hot, sharp edge of a knife and no, no, no. You back up quickly, the need to get away from the happily smiling boy in the photographs akin to trying to escape a knife lodged between your ribs. The lamp falls, clatters, and you think this, this, this is why he hasn't called, why he hasn't even had anyone else check, and there's loss in the shattering of the lamp as your cousin's eyes fly open.
Guilt lights her eyes. "Let me explain."
You feel a terrible sort of laughter bubbling up inside you, like shards plunged deep. Has she seen him here, you ask, needing to know if it's happening now, now, now and not in Polaroids (in bed, the Polaroid, your mind reminds you.) "Yes," and, "we didn't know how to tell you." Whose idea was it? Going behind your back? "I don't know," and "it was mine."
You can't stay there. You can't. Even jail is better. Anywhere is better, and you run, you run and you run and you run, as if you could ever run from something that is tearing you apart on the inside. You wonder how long its been happening, because there is no past-tense here, and there was none in her words. Since she arrived? Since the fear gas? While you were at work every night? While he was coming to the suite every night to see your son?
"We didn't know how to tell you." The words thrum in yours ears, over the sobs that are wracking your shoulders, and you imagine weeks and weeks, and you remember how he smiled in the Polaroids, and he never smiles at you like that anymore, and you shatter into a million pieces.