I place my hands on the wall to steady myself; I will myself not to breathe, so that I won’t wake Willow, trying hard to extend the time between breaths until I become lightheaded and dizzy.
There is a clock in this room, as well, red digital numbers that drift from 2:21 to 4:18 a.m., all in the blink of an eye as I hover, there, at the foot of the sofa bed, wanting to cover the baby with the chenille throw, to move her, a foot or more from Willow’s body so that I don’t have to worry about her being smothered or squished flat.
Wanting to lift her up and carry her from this room.
But I can’t.
Because then Willow will know.
And she may leave.
WILLOW
In here we wear orange jumpsuits, the word juvenile stitched across the back. We sleep in brick rooms, two to a cell, on metal bunk beds, with heavy bars separating us from the concrete corridor where guards—tyrannical women with bodies built like men—stride all night long. We eat at long tables in a cafeteria, from chipped pastel trays loaded with foods from each of the food groups: meat, bread, fruits and vegetables, a glass of milk.
It’s not all that bad, not when compared to picking food from the Dumpster and sleeping on the street.
My cell mate is a girl who tells me her name is Diva. The guards call her Shelby. She has plum-colored hair though her eyebrows are a plain old brown. She sings. All the time. All night long. The guards, other inmates tell her to shut up, to put a sock in it, to shut her pie hole, calling the words out from places we can’t see. I ask her why she’s in here, behind the metal bars like me, sitting on the concrete floor because she swears her bed has been booby-trapped, but all she says is, “You don’t want to know,” and I’m left wondering.
She’s fifteen, maybe sixteen, like me. I see the holes where she was made to remove various piercings: the lip, the septum, the cartilage of her ear. She sticks out her tongue and shows me where it’s been pierced, and tells me how her tongue swelled to twice its size when she had it done, how she couldn’t talk for days. How some girl she knew split her tongue right in two when she did it. She claims her nipple’s been pierced, her belly button. She starts to tell me about something that’s been pierced beneath the pants of that orange jumpsuit, about how the guard watched as she was forced to remove the j-bar from her clit before locking her up in the slammer, and then she mutters under her breath, “Fucking dyke.”
I turn away, embarrassed, and she starts to sing. Someone tells her to shut her trap. She sings louder, high pitched and off-key, like the grating brakes of a freight train coming to a sudden stop.
The guard fetches me from my cell. She binds my hands in cuffs, then leads me by the arm to where Louise Flores waits in the cold room with the steel table. She’s standing in the corner today, peering out the one window, her back to me when I walk in. She’s got on a scratchy-looking cardigan, the color of smoke, a pair of black pants. There’s a cup of tea on the table, a cup of juice for me.
“Good morning, Claire,” she says as we both take our spots at the table. She doesn’t smile. The clock on the wall reads just after ten o’clock.
Ms. Flores motions to the guard to remove my cuffs.
The male guard from the day before is gone. Out of sight. In his place is a middle-aged woman, her gray hair wrapped in a bun. She perches herself where two walls meet, and crosses her arms against herself, the handle of a gun peeking out of a holster.
“I brought you some juice,” says Ms. Flores, “and a doughnut,” she adds as she sets a paper bag on the table.
Bribery.
Like when Joseph, from time to time, came home with a chocolate chip cookie from the community college’s cafeteria, wrapped in cellophane. So that later that night I wouldn’t think twice about pulling that big, old T-shirt I wore to bed up over my hips and letting Joseph draw the undies down my thighs.
She sets her glasses on the bridge of her nose and looks back into the notes from the day before. Leaving the Omaha home with Matthew. Riding the buses all the way out to the zoo.
“What happened when you got home that afternoon? From the zoo?” she asks.
“Nothing, ma’am,” I say as I reach into the bag and remove a doughnut, double chocolate with sprinkles, and stuff it into my mouth. “I was back home well before Joseph,” I mumble. “Well before Isaac. Miriam was in her room, with no sense of time or nothing. I made her lunch and started the laundry, so that later, when I told Joseph I’d done laundry all day, there’d be proof of it—laundry on the line. He’d never know it was a lie.”
She hands me a napkin, motioning to my cheek. I wipe at the chocolate residue, then lick my fingers clean. I guzzle the juice.
I tell her how riding the buses with Matthew became more or less a regular thing. We didn’t go to the zoo more than the one time because the zoo cost money and money was one thing Matthew didn’t have. We went places we could go without money. We went to parks, and Matthew showed me how to pump the swings, something I’d forgotten since my days back in Ogallala. Sometimes we just walked up and down the streets of Omaha, past the big buildings and all of those people.
And then one day Matthew took me to the library. I remembered how I loved going to the library with Momma. I loved the smell, and the sight of all those books. Thousands of books. Millions of books! Matthew asked me what I wanted to learn about—anything in the whole wide world—and I thought about it long and hard, and then I told Matthew that I wanted to know more about the planets. He nodded his head and said, “Okay. Astronomy it is,” and I followed Matthew as he waltzed through the library like he owned the place, and took me to a bunch of books on astronomy, as he called it, the sun, the moon, the stars. The library was quiet, and in that aisle with the astronomy books, Matthew and I were all alone, tucked between the tall bookcases like we were the only people in the whole entire world. We sat on the floor and leaned against the big bookshelves, and one by one I started pulling the books from the shelf and admiring their covers: the black nighttime sky all cluttered up with stars.
Growing up without a mother there were things I wanted to know but had no one to ask. Like why, every now and again, my body started bleeding, and I was made to stuff my underwear with wads of toilet tissue to keep it from ruining my pants. Like why I was growing hair where no hair used to be, and why parts of my body were getting bigger for no apparent reason at all. There wasn’t one lady in my life I could ask. The caseworker was the only one, but of course, I couldn’t talk to her about those things because she’d want to know why I wasn’t just talking to Miriam, ’cause every time Ms. Amber Adler came around, Miriam was taking the little white pills and acting almost normal. Almost. But Miriam was far from normal.
All those questions were about the outside, but I had questions about the inside, too. Especially about Matthew, and this whole strange slew of emotions I felt whenever he was around. I felt an urge to be close to him, and lonely when he wasn’t there. I waited each and every day of my life for him to appear at the door once Joseph and Isaac had gone, feeling sad on the days he didn’t come.
I was seeing things I’d never seen before when Matthew came and got me out of that house: beautiful women with rippling hair, the color of straw or cinnamon or macaroni and cheese, their faces fancy, dressed in wonderfully complicated clothes: tall leather boots with heels, skintight jeans, pants made of leather, teal pumps, dozens of bangle bracelets flanking an arm, shirts with scoop necks, sweaters with holes where bras showed through the burgundy or jade or navy fabric. Women and men holding hands, and kissing. Smoking cigarettes, talking on phones.