Mafia Girl

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “C’mon, Gia,” he says, “don’t be such a killjoy.”

  He’s talking about going upstate, which would take four hours, and asking why we have to get back so soon, and we’re having this stupid conversation while he’s going like seventy-five. I’m starting to get cold and cranky and I hear a siren and think, oh shit, we’re going to get pulled over. And crap, this is not what I need. But no, the cop isn’t chasing us, because, thank God, there’s someone who’s going even faster than we are. And I look at the police car and start to think, could it be Michael? Omigod, what if it is Michael, would he bust us? And how intensely weird would that be?

  Only no, it’s not Michael, because the cop is some fat, beefy guy with reddish skin, and I am starting to think that I’ve lost it because New York City has, what, about thirty-five thousand cops, so why is that thought even entering my mind now?

  For a fleeting second I think about what Clive found out about Michael. I’m tempted to ask him just to know once and for all what the mystery is all about then decide no, that’s stupid and just forget it.

  I close my eyes and concentrate on the wind blowing my hair and I pretend I’m sitting on the wing of an airplane as it flies through the open sky carrying me to a different life.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Dante heads downtown. We stop at a red light and in the next lane there’s a bus and I look up and see a huge ad for Vogue and I realize that this is the new issue, and no, I’m not on the cover and was never supposed to be, but I am inside, at least I think I am.

  “Pull over, pull over,” I yell. I make him stop at a newsstand and I buy five copies.

  I look and look and then there they are, my pictures. For a few seconds I just stare because at first I don’t recognize my own face and I need to examine what’s on the page in front of me. It feels like one of those tests at the eye doctor’s office where they click, click, click, and things either get fuzzier or sharper and you raise your finger when everything is finally 20/20.

  First is a full-page picture, the first of a series of portraits of us in a kind of portfolio with the headline: Underage and Over the Top. That had to be John Plesaurus’s idea, I realize, because he’s such a deviant. But whatever, the pictures are killers, and I show them to Dante, who looks and looks and says, “Holy crap, Gia, you look gorgeous.”

  “We have to go home,” I say, so he takes me back, and I call Ro and Clive and Candy and show my mom, and everyone is like, “Gia, I’m running out right now to buy it.” And then I look online, and there it is too. At that moment there are only two people in the world I want to call up and tell.

  Only I can’t. Which just sucks.

  On the way to school the next day, all I keep thinking about is Vogue and the pictures and what people are going to say, but when I get inside there is this strange mood in the air and I can’t decide if it’s me or if something is going on. I wave to Clive and he comes over and whispers in my ear and I realize that no, it’s not me, there really is a creepy vibe.

  No one is supposed to know but at Morgan nothing stays secret for long, and someone heard someone who overheard someone, and the next thing we find out is that the school paper has a story about it even though the administration didn’t want that. But since this is the USA and we do have free speech, they decided they couldn’t “curtail the school paper’s freedom to tell the truth.” So it says that Christy, Georgina, and Brandy have been “asked to leave”—otherwise known as being suspended—for an indefinite amount of time for “misconduct.”

  Bottom line: They stole the ballots. And removed enough votes.

  To make. Me. Lose.

  Only why did they confess? I talk to Clive and Ro and Candy who spoke to other people who spoke to other people who saw stuff on Facebook, and the story is that Mr. Wright interviewed each of them separately and must have turned the heat up and brought in their parents and—bingo—Christy started crying and admitted everything.

  After school Clive and Ro and I talk about celebrating but then think how lowbrow is that, so we hang out without exactly drinking Dom and reflect on the depths of their depravity or what have you while in our own quiet way we rejoice that they’ll be gone, at least until the beginning of the new school year. And from this day forward, Morgan will be a better place—or as Clive says, “a more noble institution.”

  Ha ha ha.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I make the mistake of telling Dante that I want to get into boxing, so the next thing I know he’s calling me up to come over because he found me gloves and a punching bag, which is already hanging from his basement ceiling like a side of beef in a meat locker.

  I immediately start hitting that sucker again and again and it feels so good that I keep on going.

  “If you want to kill your hands, Gia, keep going.”

  He makes me take off the gloves and he wraps my hands with tape like the pros do, which is probably ridiculous at this point, and then he shows me the moves. “Face the bag with one foot in front and one behind,” he says, “and jab with the first two knuckles.” He jabs, jabs, jabs, punching straight out, and then so do I and then cross hook with my left hand, and it’s like, jab, stun ’em, and cross, hurt ’em, and I get a rhythm going and I’m starting to sweat.

  “Okay, Gia, let’s take a break and I’ll show you the uppercuts,” Dante says.

  But I’m jabbing, jabbing, jabbing hard and thinking of Wentworth and Christy and Brandy and jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, and cross hooking, and—whoa—this boxing stuff is very, very good for totally getting rid of the stress, and I keep going and going and going and…

  “GIA, ARE YOU DEAF? STOP!” Dante yells.

  I look at him. And stop. And if that bag was a person, we’d need a priest.

  The next day we train again and I’m dancing around the bag keeping my elbows in close to protect myself and learning to uppercut to the rib cage and then do the head-on kicks to the stomach and the side kicks and the roundhouse kicks and finally the kicks from the back of the body that you save for when you want to seriously do damage like break ribs, and then two hours or so have gone by.

  “You wanna go out for dinner?” Dante asks.

  I catch my breath and realize I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been and never mind food, the only thing I need is sleep because tomorrow I have to be up at the crack of dawn.

  To visit my dad.

  In prison.

  FORTY-SIX

  It’s three a.m. and I’m so wired I can’t sleep. Before breakfast we’re flying to Denver and then driving over a hundred miles south to Florence, Colorado, a place no one has heard of unless they’re in law enforcement or the family of someone who’s locked away in the supermax prison there and I’m twisting and shifting in bed and I’m cold and hot and in between and I get up and pee and get back into bed and try to sleep all over again.

  But then my phone rings and my heart gets crazed. I glance at the caller ID, which I don’t have to because I know who it is, and think about how he just picked the wrong time to do this because—screw you, Michael, I’m just in the worst possible frame of mind and I don’t know what to say or not to say to you anymore and I can’t even go there now because I’m shaking like I’m living on a fault line and the earth is opening beneath my feet.

  Are you glad they put my dad away? Are you breathing easier now? Or are you calling to say you’re sorry for me? I don’t need your pity so go away and just leave me alone.

  It rings and rings and then he must hear my voice in his head because it stops.

  Anthony and my mom are both dressed in blue. Anthony is in his best suit, a navy silk Brioni and a starched white shirt with a blue-striped Armani tie. My mom is wearing a royal blue woolen Valentino dress with a single gold cross around her neck. The rest of her crosses and all of her jewelry, including her diamond engagement ring, are gone now, part of the payback to the government.

  I’m in a funereal black pantsuit with dark heels and sunglasses and a small gold cross on my nec
k. I’m searching in my drawer for a tie to hold my hair back when my hand lands on a red painted stone with a black and white spotted design, my Aboriginal gratitude rock.

  It fits securely in the palm of my hand. I hold onto it and then drop it into my bag, which is already stuffed with tissues and Xanax because visiting your dad in the country’s most secure prison is not a walk in the park.

  I think back to after school when I said good-bye to Clive and Ro and Candy. They all looked like they were about to burst into tears. I pretended not to notice.

  “We’ll all go out to dinner next week…somewhere interesting,” I said.

  “Definitely,” Clive said. “I’ll look for a new place, maybe Thai?”

  “That would be cool,” Ro said.

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  Silence.

  Uncomfortable stares everywhere but at me. We were all doing a miserable job of trying to look cheerful.

  I gathered my books together quickly. “I better go.”

  Just as I was rushing toward the door, Ro ran over.

  “Gia, wait,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Tell your dad, tell him that… we love him and pray for him every day. And Gia, I’m just so sorry for you.”

  Where was my hard-ass friend when I needed her?

  “As if praying helps…”

  “Gia…” She came toward me with her arms out, but I couldn’t let her hug me because…

  “I’m sorry, Ro, I’m being such a bitch.”

  “No you’re not, Gia. I wish I could trade places with you—”

  She actually meant it.

  “I’ll tell him, Ro.” Then I ran.

  My hands are functioning without a brain, stowing things in an overnight bag. You’ll get through it, I keep telling myself. Like I have a choice.

  We get off the plane almost six hours later and follow Anthony to the Hertz desk then leave the terminal and walk to the parking lot, slipping and sliding on the icy patches covering the ground. The sky is steely gray. My breath hovers in front of me like a frosty ghost.

  We drive to a cheap motel and eat burgers and fries from a fast food joint and watch TV shows with forced laughter and take aspirin and try to sleep, pretending that the heater isn’t clanking loud and that the bed isn’t lumpy. In the morning Anthony drives us to the prison.

  I read about it online to get prepared, to know something, anything, about where my father would be spending the rest of his life.

  Thirty-seven acres. Four-hundred-and-ninety beds. Cell furniture made out of poured concrete. Showers run on a timer so they can’t flood. Toilets that turn off if they are stopped up. Sinks without stoppers that could be used as weapons. Fourteen hundred remote-controlled steel doors. Twelve-foot-high razor wire fences. Laser beams, motion detectors, cameras, and guard dogs monitor the prison 24/7 in addition to staff. One of the few journalists ever to tour it said the inside was filled with “an eerie silence,” a description that sounds like it was lifted from the latest bestseller about life in a dystopian universe.

  Only this is real.

  Nonfiction.

  ADX, the only supermax in the federal prison system, was built in 1994.

  No one has ever escaped.

  We enter and I see a large black-and-white photo of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. ADX is sometimes called the Alcatraz of the Rockies. They’re proud of that, I think. There are also photographs of people responsible for the prison. The only one I recognize is President Obama.

  After they take our pictures and search us, they take all our stuff. I turn over my handbag and so does my mom. It makes me rethink everything I keep with me every day and how it could be used by someone trying to escape: a nail file, a tiny Swiss Army knife that holds a pair of scissors, tweezers, and a pen. Useful tools. Even the small, smooth gratitude rock. I doubt that the Aborigines ever thought about how it could be used by an angry inmate against a prison guard.

  Anthony empties his pockets, handing them his phone, his wallet, his keys, and his pocketknife, a larger one than mine. We walk in stages as they unlock doors in front of us and then lock them behind us. We’re under lockdown now too. We’re inmates. We can’t bring gifts, not even food.

  “Would some lasagna be so terrible?” my mom keeps repeating. “Just something from home to make him feel better. One meal. Only one meal.”

  Only no one here is interested in making the inmates here feel better or at home. They’re interested in only one thing: keeping them locked away.

  We go forward, only our stripped-down selves. After I don’t know how many hours of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and waiting, and doing nothing except dreading and living in hell and making promises to God in exchange for mercy for my dad, we go down a long, underground hallway where there are one word signs. Loyalty. Honesty. Integrity.

  Isn’t that like too much too late? And what’s the purpose now, to make everyone feel guilty for what can’t be changed? We enter a concrete room like a bunker with video cameras all around, recording every eyeblink, every hiccup. We wait more and more and all I can do is bite at my cuticles until blood seeps out and I have to suck it away until it stops. Then I play with the cross around my neck, running it back and forth along the chain and think of songs in my head and try to recite poetry that I memorized in the fifth grade and then make more deals with God and ask him to step up to the plate right now and prove himself to me because if ever there was a time…

  Then.

  Suddenly.

  Out of a dungeon room. In the back somewhere. A form takes shape.

  My dad.

  And he’s…oh my God, so, so different now.

  No silk designer suit or fine cashmere bathrobe. No confident stride. A short-sleeve prison uniform. His legs shackled together so he can take only small baby steps. His hands cuffed, attached to a chain connected to a black box attached to his waist. Hair clipped so short it shows his scalp. His face drawn, his perpetual tan gone yellow. He’s thin, so thin, hollowed eyes as if life has been gouged out of him.

  My daddy…

  How can I stand this?

  But he can still smile. They haven’t stolen that yet. And it changes him back, a little.

  “Daddy!” I call out, my voice coming out high-pitched and shrill after not speaking for nearly a day and a half. Only how stupid to call him because he can’t hear me behind the thick glass partition. He can’t hear anything inside this tomb. There’s a phone. That’s why there’s a phone. We have to use it to talk to him.

  My mom goes first.

  “How do you feel?” she asks in a pitying voice, holding the phone in her left hand, her right in a fist in her lap.

  He shrugs and she listens while I try to lip-read his answer.

  “How do they treat you?” she says and then, “what do you eat here?” Then more questions about “the room” because she won’t say cell, and answers I can’t hear or lip-read, but I watch his face. That’s enough. My dad is tough. Sure of himself. He’s been beaten up by fists and real life and been in and out of prisons before.

  Only he’s never had to face anything like this.

  No enemy is as tough as solitary.

  My mom gives the phone to Anthony. He talks about business and everything is straightforward. Emotionless. Only it isn’t. All that is kept behind Anthony’s eyes because he’s good at that. He’s been trained by the master. Finally it’s my turn.

  “I’ll give you Gia,” Anthony says. He crosses his arms over his chest, like he’s giving my dad a hug.

  But my dad holds up a finger.

  “What?” Anthony says.

  “Be clean,” he says.

  Anthony looks unsure. He raises an eyebrow. “Dad, I…”

  “Listen to me,” my dad says, staring intently at my brother. “Listen to me. It’s over.”

  Anthony hands me the phone, and I fall silent, stupid, forgetting everything I wanted to say and the whole script that I practiced again and again. I’m dumb. My mouth is dry. All I ca
n feel are the hot tears about to flood my eyes, tears I’ve tried to fight off and vowed to hide inside me.

  “It’s okay,” my dad starts, studying me. “It’s okay, my Gia,” he says, because saying it isn’t okay would hurt me too much.

  “What do you do…every day?” I ask, remembering a question.

  “I read, I pray…” He smiles. “And all the memories, I have all the memories and go over them. Like our home movies, remember?”

  I swallow and nod.

  “You tell me…about everything,” he says. “How is school?”

  I tell him about Clive and Ro and the election and what Christy and Brandy and Georgina did. “They tried to cheat—to steal the ballots, Daddy,” I say haltingly. “But we didn’t let them get away with it. I spoke to the principal and asked for a recount and they found the missing ballots and counted again and I won.” Only now it sounds like some kind of hollow victory to me. “I won,” I repeat. “I’m president.”

  “President!” he says, his eyes lighting up. He nods. It makes him so proud. I talk more and more to give him information to fill up his now empty life.

  What I don’t tell him is about the scholarship because it would tear him up. He’d know why Clive’s parents did it. He’d know that without their help I’d be out of Morgan and he doesn’t need anything else to haunt him while he’s lying on his back in his cell for twenty-three hours a day, a cell that’s always lit and monitored 24/7. Only a single hour to exercise in a space that resembles an empty swimming pool so none of the inmates know their location for possible escape. He doesn’t say that, but I know it. I read it. Still I ask him about his “room.”

  “There’s a window and I can see a sliver of blue sky,” he says. “That helps.”

  A sliver? A tiny fraction of the outside world. That’s what they’ve left him. I feel like I need to double over because of the hurt. This place will drive him insane. But I snap to. Herbie. I’ll tell him about Herbie.

  “We adopted a dog, Daddy.”

  My dad’s eyes widen. “What kind, a puppy?”