"Grace. Talk to me."
"I'm fine. It's just a headache."
"You don't get headaches."
He's right. I don't. In four years of working together, I've never called in sick, never complained about a headache, never missed a shift. The pills handled everything. The pills made me functional and stable and even and predictable, and without them my body is announcing its displeasure in ways I don't have a reference for.
"First time for everything," I say. "Table two is a reservation for noon. Did the wine order come in?"
He lets it go. For now.
The shift is hell.
The headache doesn't fade. It gets worse. By two PM the overhead lights in the dining room feel like they're drilling into my skull, and the sound of plates clinking makes me wince. I drop a bread basket at table six. I enter the wrong order for table three and Marco screams at me through the pass and I stand there and take it because I don't have the energy to fire back.
The fragments come at three seventeen.
I'm in the kitchen doorway, waiting for a plate, and the smell of the branzino hits me. Fish. Lemon. Olive oil. And underneath those smells, something else. Something that isn't in Marco'skitchen. A chemical smell, institutional, the same one from the shower flash last week but stronger. Closer. The branzino smell layers on top of the chemical smell and my stomach heaves. I grip the doorframe and close my eyes and the fragment arrives.
Not a flash this time, but a scene. A room with no windows. A floor that's gray and cold and cracked. A metal door with a slot at the bottom. The smell of disinfectant and something else, something biological, sweat and urine and fear. My hands are small. Child's hands. Pressed flat against the cold floor. My finger is tapping the concrete. One beat. Two beats. Fast. The rhythm I know, the rhythm I've always known, and in this fragment I can see the origin. A small girl on a cold floor, tapping her finger against concrete to remind herself she's still alive.
"Grace."
Devon is standing in front of me. His face is concerned. I'm gripping the doorframe hard enough that my knuckles are white, and I don't know how long I've been standing here.
"Your plate is up," he says.
I take the plate and deliver it. I smile through the tears pressing in the back of my eyes before walking to the bathroom and locking the door. I vomit into the toilet and my whole body is shaking and my finger is tapping the tile floor in the same rhythm the girl in the fragment was tapping on the concrete.
I'm on my knees in the bathroom of the restaurant where I've worked for four years, throwing up and tapping the floor, tryingto understand what I just saw. A room with no windows. A metal door. Child's hands on concrete. My hands. Those were my hands. I know because the tapping is the same. The exact same rhythm, the exact same finger, and I've been doing it my whole life and now I know where it started.
It started on a floor I don't remember.
In a room I've never been in.
Except I have been in it. My body knows. My body has always known. My body kept the tapping when my mind couldn't keep the room.
I flush the toilet and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror in dismay. My skin is gray and my eyes are bloodshot and I look sick because I am sick, not from a virus, not from bad food. Sick because the medication I've been taking for eleven years is gone and my body is releasing things that don’t make sense.
But what else can I do? Work is all I have so I go back to the floor and finish the shift. I carry plates and pour water and smile and function because that's what I do.
Carmelo never showed today and that adds to my confusion. My anger. I need him and he isn’t here.Why isn’t he here?
At closing, Javi walks me home. He doesn't joke. He doesn't tease. He just walks beside me, looking at me like I might explode at any moment without warning.
"Eat something tonight," he says at my door.
"Yeah."
"I mean it. You threw up. I heard you."
"Bad branzino."
"Marco's branzino is never bad and you know it." He stands on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. "Whatever is happening, you can tell me. You know that, right?"
"I know. I'm fine. Goodnight, Javi."
He goes. I lock the door. I sit on my bed with my phone and the empty pill bottle.