The mopping and humming had moved farther down the hallway, and I could hear the deputy on duty clear his throat, turn the pages of a magazine or newspaper. I got up and turned off the light switch near the door. The nurse’s button glowed white at the head of my bed, and I made my way back to the chair at the window, the vinyl upholstery sticking to the backs of my bare legs, and I remembered Mrs. Behrani bringing tea and kiwi fruit to her son’s room for me, her brown eyes full of compassion as she looked down at my bruised arms, as if her husband doing that had been the only reason I showed up at her doorstep drunk with Lester’s gun.
But it was everything: it was talking to my brother Frank and hearing that same old patronizing tone; it was the Mexican boy flicking his tongue out at me, his eyes on my crotch like it was something he’d already seen a hundred times before; it was wearing stolen clothes; it was the bright sun on the day after I had drunk too much with Lester the night before; it was my dry mouth, and the deep hungover fear I had that Lester had used me up already and was going back to his wife; it was driving through his neighborhood of one-story ranch houses in the heat looking for what I hoped I wouldn’t find—it was all of these things and none of them; it was Lester pulling out of me at the fish camp, coming onto me in what I was sure was a sudden change of heart; it was me letting Lester finish what we’d both started, letting all this happen so I could put off facing my mother and brother with the news that somehow Dad’s house had slipped through my fingers: I’d been willing for Lester to do anything so I could put off that moment of judgment.
I looked out over the empty parking lot, at the shadowed wooden fence and the black trees behind it, and for a while I tried to tell myself it was the colonel who had brought all this down on us. It was him not doing the right thing with my father’s house. It was his greed, and it was his pride. I remembered him on his new roof deck with his wife and daughter and friends, his expensive suit, a flute of champagne in his hand, potted flowers set in the corners of the railing and on the floor, laughing at something one of the fat rich women had said, the way he looked at me as we drove by, his eyes narrowed, all the muscles of his face still with some kind of concentration that scared me.
The door behind me opened and the light from the hall spread across the room. I didn’t turn around but in the window reflection I could see the deputy’s silhouette, his short haircut and baggy short sleeves, his gun belt. He seemed to look from the chair to the bed, then at the chair again before he stepped back into the hallway, the heavy door closing by itself. My throat felt like cracked stone and with each swallow my eyes would tear, but I didn’t let myself get up for water or broth.
I slept in my chair at the window. When I opened my eyes the darkness was fading and I watched the light come from the east, spreading over the stucco house and its yard, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Now the little boy’s mother drank her coffee and read her paper on the deck. She leaned forward as she read, her thick hair gathered over one shoulder. I wondered what her husband was like. Was he kind to her? Did he want a child when his wife got pregnant? Did they make love early in the morning before their son woke up? My throat hurt worse than ever. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, the toilet still flushing, a new doctor and the deputy were standing at the foot of the bed waiting for me. The doctor was tall. He introduced himself, then had me sit on the bed and he looked down my throat with his penlight, put his fingers on my lymph glands, and told me not to talk for ten to fourteen more days. The deputy’s eyes were full of a light that reminded me of my brother: fascinated by other people’s trouble, happy he was in the clear. The doctor wrote something on the clipboard, then left, and the deputy handed me my old clothes: my shorts, the girl’s Fisherman’s Wharf T-shirt, her too-small yellow panties. He told me I was being transferred to Redwood City to be booked, then he left the room and I changed at the window, my eyes on the boy and his mother. The underpants were still tight at my hips and as I pulled on my shirt and shorts the boy stood, his hands open at his sides. He climbed out of the sandbox and walked over the grass. He stepped onto the deck in front of his mother, then held his hands out in front of him, his chin pulled in slightly, his belly sticking out. His mother smiled down at him. She wiped the sand off his hands and lifted him onto her lap, his small back against her breasts, his sneakers just barely reaching her knees. The door opened behind me but I didn’t turn around and I could smell the deputy’s spearmint gum as he said he was sorry but he had to follow procedure and he took my wrists and slipped the cool metal of his handcuffs onto them, clicking them closed, my pulse pushing against them. I couldn’t see the boy’s face anymore, and in the hours and days that followed I would think of him, the way an important dream comes back to you throughout the day, a day that begins at six-thirty, my door unlocking electronically, me stepping out onto the second tier and filing downstairs with black women and white women, Chicanas, all of us dressed in the orange khaki pants and tank tops and overshirts of the San Mateo County Jail, over fifty of us.
On the bottom tier we sit at steel tables and eat toast and cold cereal or scrambled eggs and sausage links. Two color TVs are fixed to the wall, tuned to morning news shows, the anchorwomen pretty and successful. In the middle of the room is a control desk with four woman deputies on duty, and on clear days the door to the rec yard is open, though it’s not a yard at all but a flat rooftop with a Universal weight-lifting gym set in the middle of it, a piece of equipment no one uses. One morning a young black girl pulled herself to the top of the chinning bar, sat there, and smoked two cigarettes. At the edge of the yard is a high hurricane fence topped with razor wire, then it’s four stories down to the streets of Redwood City. You can see the old domed courthouse and part of the Hall of Justice building where Lester used to work. But of course Lester is here with me now, somewhere under us in another wing with the men, the carjackers and rapists and murderers.
On the bottom tier after breakfast, most of the women stay at the tables and smoke and talk. There are pay phones on the wall which never go unused, women calling their kids and boyfriends or husbands collect, their eyes miles away as they talk and sometimes yell or cry into the phone. Some even laugh. But I don’t. I don’t smoke either. My throat can’t tolerate it, the smoke going down like grit rubbed into a raw scrape.
There’s a black woman named Jolene who smokes pack after pack of Marlboro Lights. Her voice is as deep as a man’s. She’s short with boyish hips and small breasts, and her knuckles are wide and hard-looking and she never stops talking and even the big women seem smaller around her. My first week, one afternoon before the midday lockdown for lunch cleanup, she tapped me on the shoulder and said loud enough for an audience, “Why you here, girl?”
I was sitting at a table with two Mexican girls who spent their lunch talking to each other in Spanish. Three or four black women were standing around and behind Jolene waiting for my answer. At first I didn’t understand her question and couldn’t talk anyway. I pointed to my throat and shook my head.
“You can’t talk?”
I nodded.
“You deaf?”
I shook my head again. One of the women behind Jolene smiled and I could see her teeth were bad.
“So you’s mute.”
The one with the bad teeth laughed. A few others smiled. One of the deputies from the control panel called over to everybody to head back to their cells for lockdown. I nodded at Jolene and she was smiling like I’d just shown her something she’d been wanting to know a long time.
“You mean God sit back with the remote and motherfuckin’ mute your ass?”
Jolene’s girls laughed and I smiled and that afternoon after supper, while we all sat at tables in front of the two TVs on two different channels, waiting for our turn to go to the commisary or laundry exchange, Jolene yelled across the room at me: “Hey, Remote! Mute them motherfuckin’ TVs!”
She laughed louder than the women around her, and from then on if a woman needed me to pass her t
he salt or hand off to somebody a lighter or cigarette, she’d say in a loud voice, “Send me the salt, Remote.” Or, “Remote, pass this down to Big April.”
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.
“Of course they’re not all right, they’re worried sick about
you. What have you done, K? Why are you here?” My mother still looks like she’s going to cry, but there’s something hard in her face now. She dabs at her mascara, her lips pressed together, bracing herself for what I am going to tell her. She’s waiting for the facts, but her last question is still a wire of words in my head that won’t stop vibrating, that’s been singing the same thing for years and years: What have you done? Why are you here?
My mother is talking into the phone again, asking me about Dad’s house, about the police tape across the front door, about the widow’s walk Frank had never given permission to build. “Can’t you speak, K? Is there something wrong with your voice? Did Nick have anything to do with this?”
Franky is looking down at me through the glass. He shrugs as if he’s not quite sure he was supposed to have mentioned that but did. I look back at my mother, her eyes waiting, always waiting. Her last question seems as ridiculous and naive as can be.
“Nick left me, Mom.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know why, Ma. Why don’t you go find him and ask him?”
My mother’s eyes turn hard now. Her question might’ve sounded different coming from somebody else, more gentle, like the man who left me must’ve been in the dark about my best qualities. But from her it was an interrogation: What did you do this time, Kathy? How could you have let him go?