After the first two weeks, when I was alone in my cell I tried talking again, naming the objects in front of me, “Floor. Wall. Toilet. Sink,” my throat aching no more than when you have an allergy, my voice maybe lower than it used to be, but I still kept quiet on the bottom tier and in the rec yard and I let them call me by my new name.
These first weeks Connie has come and seen me three times, once with two detectives who took me to a room and had me write how the colonel tried to strangle me before he went on to do the rest. Lawyers and visitors have to go to the mezzanine on the second tier, a room of enclosed booths with thick glass separating us from visitors. Until I could use my voice again, Connie would talk into the phone while I wrote my answers and questions and held them up to the glass. Now that my voice is back I hunch forward and talk softly into the receiver so none of the other inmates with visitors will notice.
Every time, Connie wants to hear the facts. I tell her what I’ve done, wishing I hadn’t said anything because her planned defense of me is that I was defenseless, suicidal, and drugged when Lester was locking the Behranis into their bathroom, that I was sick and physically weak, my judgment impaired, the next day when he forced the colonel and his son to Redwood City. She wants to argue that I am not who they’re charging me as being, though she admits she has a mountain to climb to prove all this because my best witnesses are no longer with us. That’s her expression, “no longer with us,” though that doesn’t seem true to me.
Connie was able to get me some money for magazines at the commisary, but during the lockdown hours after our meals, I sit on my bunk and can’t even look at them. Instead, I keep seeing Mrs. Behrani, her small lined face, her deep brown eyes, the way she looked at me, one woman to another, when she asked if Lester would hurt her son, who I feel hovering in the corners of my cell, a young and polite presence. And I see his father in a way I never saw him, his bald head turned towards me, his face with no expression, like nothing I did to him can touch him now, but his eyes are two dark stars of grief.
Sometimes I sit against the wall on the rec roof with the sun on my face. I can hear the TVs inside, the chatter of the other women, one of them coughing. I look past the chain-link fence at the edge of the roof, the razor wire too bright, and I ache to see Lester, to lie beside him in the hot loft of the fish camp, to kiss his crooked mustache and hold his narrow back. I remember his ex-partner at the hospital saying he’ll be thrown to the hounds, and I can only hope he’s wrong, that the guards will look out for one of their own, though I feel like I’m lying to myself thinking this. I don’t let myself think of his kids, or his wife, and if I think of the house at all it’s only that I should’ve died there and nobody else, of how much better it would’ve been if Mr. Behrani never saved me from Lester’s gun, if Mrs. Behrani never saved me from her own pills.
Today Jolene walks over to me, a cigarette smoking between her lips, her eyes squinting like a man’s. “Mezzanine bitch sent me to get you. You got visitors.”
I’m so surprised to hear this I almost ask out loud who. But instead I keep my eyes on Jolene, waiting for her to say more.
“That’s right, Remote, somebody wants to do sign language.”
Only two days before, I saw Connie. She’s still working on getting my hearing date moved up. I told her I didn’t want her to make me look like I wasn’t responsible for what Lester had done.
“But you weren’t, Kathy. We’re not fabricating any of that.” Connie looked at me through the glass, the phone pressed to her ear. I could see small red marks on both sides of her nose from reading glasses or sunglasses. She looked tired, her lips parted, ready to argue against whatever I was about to say. The other visiting cubicles were empty, but I kept my voice to a whisper as I talked into the phone. “I’ll deny it. I’ll say I was sober and never took any pills.”
Connie Walsh shook her head, her lips pressing tightly together. “Then what is our defense, Kathy?”
“I don’t have one. A family is gone.” My throat started to close up and I turned my face away. I put the receiver back on the hook, left the mezzanine, and went back out to the tier where I knew I wouldn’t cry, where I was relieved I didn’t have a voice.
Now I climb the concrete steps to the second tier, thinking it is either Connie or she’s dropped me as her client and it’ll be a new lawyer, one assigned by the state. A blond deputy opens the door for me. Whoever has come is sitting, and I’m not close enough to see who through the glass over the cubicles, one of them taken up by a Chicana girl, her husband or boyfriend on the other side holding the phone to a little girl’s ear. Then, behind the glass a few cubicles down, my brother Frank stands up. He’s wearing a banana-yellow polo shirt, his black hair is moussed back, and there’s a thin gold chain around his neck, a gold watch band on his wrist. He’s gained weight, the curve of his belly pushing his belt buckle a little. He’s squinting into the glass, his hands on his hips, but he doesn’t see me. Then he does and his lips part, his eyes get shiny, and I want to turn and walk back out onto the tier: I hadn’t sent a letter; I hadn’t made one phone call; I guess I was waiting for Labor Day to come and go, for my mother and aunts to drive by the empty house and know Frank had been right, that I was away on a trip and wouldn’t be back for a long time.
Franky begins to blur. I wipe my eyes, step into the phone stall, and there’s my mother sitting in the chair looking up at me like I’m a vision she’s been both praying and dreading would come. She’s wearing too much makeup, the blush too pink and high on her cheeks, her lipstick too red. She’s wearing her costume pearls and a purple-and-blue flowered dress. And she’s just had her hair done. From where I stand, my breath high in my throat, I can see a round spot of scalp through her thinning hair. There are old-lady tendons in her throat.
Frank picks up the receiver and starts to say something, but then stops and waits for me to raise mine. I stay standing and hold the receiver, light as balsa wood, to my ear.
“Why didn’t you call us, Kath?”
I glance down at my mother. She’s looking up at me through the glass, her eyes slightly bloodshot. I swallow and point to my throat and am about to say I couldn’t call at the time but Frank interrupts me.
“You can’t talk?”
I don’t answer but feel myself slide back into the lie like a warm bath. My mother turns and asks him for the phone. “K? Are you all right? Your aunts and I drove by the house yesterday and there was that police tape over the doors and windows. Why can’t you talk? Franky flew out this morning. It took us all day to find you. No one would tell us anything, K. Honey, are you all right?” My mother was squinting into the glass like I was a ghost that might fade away any second. And that’s how I felt, dead to them, nothing but a voice from the other side; I started to feel strangely at ease, safely out of their reach in every way.
My mother’s lower lip starts to quiver. Her eyes go from mine to my county-jail orange, then back to my face, and I want to stand and show her all of it, the whole costume, every piece of it right down to the orange underwear that’s as big and loose as a man’s. I lean close to the glass and speak into the phone, “I’m all right, Mother.” I have never called her that, only Mom or Ma, but I like the sound of Mother, the dignity it seems to give her, the bereaved.
“K? What happened?” She starts to cry. Franky puts his hand on her shoulder and hands her his monogrammed handkerchief. I look up at his face through the glass, but he isn’t looking at me; his eyes are on the countertop, and he seems about to go off into a stare, like he’d just as soon sit this moment out somewhere else, but also there’s hurt in his face, and for a second I wonder about Jeannie and the kids, is everything all right at home? I must have asked this into the phone, and the question props my mother up instantly.