by Ninie Hammon
She was so excited she was bouncing on the edge of the chair. Her brown inmate dress was on right side out, Mac noticed. Wednesday. But she was still barefoot.
“Of course, I remembered. Don’t you have any shoes?”
“You think this prison could get away with not giving prisoners shoes? I ain’t never liked shoes, they hurt my feet. Now, will you sit down and show me the picture ’fore I explode all over this here room!”
Mac sat down and reached into his pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out, along with the three candy bars.
Princess looked at the candy bars as if she’d never seen one before.
“These are for you,” Mac said. “I asked, and they told me I could bring in food if it was in the original wrapper, something you could get out of a vending machine. You like candy?”
“These are for me?” The voice, deep and soft. Timid, like a small child, with laryngitis.
“Sure, they’re for you. Which is your favorite—Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, or Hershey?”
“You brought these for me?” The incredulity finally registered.
“It’s three candy bars, Princess. Not the Hope Diamond.”
She looked up at him and her almost-purple eyes were brimming over with tears. “I do thank you kindly, sir,” she whispered. She reached out her hand to take one, the nearest, the Butterfinger, but was unable to touch it.
Her hand began to tremble and she shook her head back and forth slowly.
“Princess, did I do something wrong?”
“No, no! It’s not you. It’s just … I don’t know if I can proper explain it.”
“Try. Small words. Nothing fancy. I think you do very well at explaining things.”
“You do?”
She smiled a little, sat up a little straighter. Took a breath.
“It’s just I got this hole in me, right here.” She looked down and patted her flat belly. “Sometimes it’s a big hole, seems wide as the big river. An’ I can feel wind blowing through it, whistling in the empty there. I think that hole’s scared, bein’ scared, but I don’t know ’cause I never had nobody to ask.” She lifted her head. “Is that hole scared? Is that what you feel like when you’re scared, a hole like that?”
Mac read the sincerity in her eyes as she spoke, and the sense he’d had that first day—that she glowed—returned. The light in the room had dimmed as the storm clouds approached, but her glowing wasn’t about light. It was more about energy, humming transformer-like from such a frail creature. He had a quick, semi-hysterical thought that when they turned on the juice to electrocute her there would be such a back-surge of power into the wires that the person who flipped the switch would fry instead.
What does scared feel like?
“What you described, that’s a lot like I feel when I’m scared,” he answered slowly, choosing his words carefully. “But that place, that hole in your gut, that’s where I feel other emotions, too.”
Suddenly, his own voice was thick. “That’s where I miss Melanie.”
He hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to get that personal. After all, he was here to comfort her, not to bare his soul.
“That hole ain’t where I ache for people,” she said. “That’s right here.” She patted her heart. “Like there’s a ice pick, stabbin’ in it and any minute the hurtin’ will be so bad, it’ll just stop beatin’ altogether.” She sighed. “It never does, though. It keeps on beatin’ whether I’m hurtin’ or laughin’, scared or snug and safe. Your heart beatin’ and air—that’s all you gotta have to live, ain’t it. And livin’s what you got; it’s all God gives you.”
Mac’s mind wasn’t tracking well. When he thought of Melanie, the pain took his breath away. He always had trouble concentrating in the moments after he got hit by that.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
“But why do these three candy bars upset you so?”
“’Cause I ain’t used to the hole not being there. Been there so long, I ain’t used to it bein’ gone, and it’s almost scary, you know, for it to be different.” She looked up at him through a forest of long, black eyelashes. “Here in this room with you, I’m solid, ain’t no hole in my middle. And that’s enough. That’s the best gift I could ever have and I’m grateful for it and if I died right this second, I’d be happy.” She paused. “Then, on top of all that, you bring me candy. Can you see how that’d be … so much you just can’t take it all in at once?”
He could see. He nodded, not trusting his voice to speak.
Instead of speaking, he just scooted the candy across the table toward her. She picked each piece up like it was a bar of pure gold and slid it into the pocket of her uniform.
“You mind if I save these for later?” She managed a teary smile. “Shoot, if I’s to eat them now, I might just pop from the pure joy of it.”
“Explosions, by and large, are not good things,” he said, testing his voice to be sure it was stable. Outside the thunder rolled again. Either the storm was a long way off or it was not a particularly powerful one. Thunder didn’t boom, just a gentle rumble.
Princess was wrapped in expectant stillness again, humming—maybe producing a sound that’d cause a dog to whine and scratch at its ears. Or glowing. He didn’t know which anymore and didn’t trust his senses to tell him. The moment he stepped into this room every day, the normal rules that governed the functioning of the universe were somehow suspended. Here, in this place, they didn’t seem to have any effect on reality.
“The picture?” she said, her voice coming from the depths of a kettle drum. “You said you’d bring a picture of your pretty little girl. Can I see it, please?”
Mac had forgotten all about the picture. He opened his billfold to the plastic picture holders. The first one was of just him and Melanie. It had been taken for the church directory last year. He rubbed his thumb over it and thought about what Princess had said about the images on her pictures, how she’d rubbed the paper off them “petting them.” He could understand that.
He turned the billfold so she could see.
“That’s my wife, my late wife. Melanie.”
“No wonder there’s a ice pick in your heart, a-missin’ her,” she said quietly. “That there’s a woman full up to overflowin’ with love and kindness.”
Princess knew things. She just knew.
“Yes,” he said, his voice shaky again. “And this is Joy.” He flipped to the next picture. It was this year’s school picture. She sat smiling into the camera, her hair fixed all neat in what she called a “flip.” Took her half a can of hair spray to get it to stay in that style, and she always gave him her oh-Daddy look when he dared to suggest that it was a lot prettier when it just hung in curls around her shoulders.
He looked from the picture to Princess. She was frozen, wasn’t even breathing. Her purple eyes, open wide, were filled with tears. She just stared at the picture, looking deep into the soul of the person whose image was captured there.
Instinctively, he reached up with his thumb and started to extract the picture from its plastic folder. “Here, would you like to see it up closer?”
But the picture was jammed tight. He had not removed the other pictures of Joy that rested beneath it, previous school pictures that he’d merely “wallpapered over” each succeeding year. When he pulled the current picture out of the plastic, the other pictures came with it, sprayed out half a dozen little Joy faces on the table top.
“Oh!” Princess squeaked. She looked up at him with tear-filled eyes, but could say nothing more than, “Oh!”
Thunder rolled again outside and rain splashed against the lone window.
Mac reached out and picked up all the pictures, then dealt them out like cards in order.
“This one,” he held a photo that said 1953–54 on the white space at the bottom of it, “is the first one, I think. Yeah, it’s when she was in first grade.”
A cute little munchkin smiled out of the black-and-white photo. She had freckles all over h
er face and a gap-toothed smile. Braids lay on her shoulders, tied at the ends with ribbons, and she wore a dress with tiny flowers on it, buttoned all the way up to her neck.
“And this one is—”
Princess suddenly covered her face with her hands and sat back in the chair. She was obviously crying. Mac could see her shoulders shaking, but she wasn’t making a sound. Then she began to rock back and forth in the chair, her face covered.
“Princess …”
No response.
“Princess, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did but—
“It’s okay,” she breathed out between her fingers. “Gimme a minute.”
She continued to rock and cry for a little while longer. Then sat quietly, her hands still over her face. Finally, she lowered her hands slowly, leaned over and wiped her face on the hem of her dress.
“I’m shamed and embarrassed by my behavior and I do sincerely ask your forgiveness for it,” she said, her voice quivering.
“No, I won’t forgive you.”
She looked startled and panicked, so he hurried on. “Because there’s nothing to forgive. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have got so crying-like over that cute little girl. I’s ’spectin’ a big girl, a teenager. I had myself all screwed up to see that.” Her voice got quiet, breathy. “Not a little girl. I wasn’t ’spectin’ to see no little girl. She … she reminds me of somebody.”
Understanding as real as a gust of wind traveled from Princess to Mac. This little girl reminded her of her sister. A sister who never lost her front teeth or started first grade. A little girl Princess had …
Mac suddenly couldn’t do it. He couldn’t connect in his head anymore that the thin woman before him with tears in her eyes had killed anybody, much less a child. It was unfathomable.
But it also was true.
Get a grip, pal! She confessed, remember?
“I’d forgotten I had all these pictures shoved in there together. I took some out over the years, but mostly I was too lazy to do anything but shove another picture down over the one before. Sort of the geological method of filing pictures—the oldest is on the bottom.”
He realized too late that the analogy went right over her head. But she didn’t appear to be listening to him anyway. She was rigid and still and moon-eyed, concentrating on the picture, her focus absolute.
In the hushed room, time derailed, ran completely off the tracks and rolled over on its side in the ditch. In the world outside, a gentle spring storm splashed water on vegetable gardens and crops, window boxes full of flowers, new-mown lawns and just-washed cars. In here, there was only the scar-faced woman and the photographs and the man who dealt them out, one by one onto the table top.
Mac was surprised that his hand was steady as he put down the next picture.
“This one says 1956–57. Joy’d have been in fourth grade then, about nine years old.”
He said nothing more, just watched Princess wrench her gaze off the little girl with braids and clamp it just as tightly on a smiling child with a full set of front teeth—though the rabbit teeth were still prominent. Her curly hair was pulled into what Melanie called dog-ears, ponytails on both sides of her head. He remembered he used to grab the ends of her dog-ears at that age and hold them straight out. Then he’d holler, “Hey, Mel, come look, an Indian just shot an arrow through Joy’s head.”
He smiled at the memory and noticed that Princess was smiling, too. An odd, little half smile.
He dealt out another picture.
“Joy’s twelve here, seventh grade. Right before puberty grabbed hold of her and hauled her away where Daddy couldn’t find his little girl anymore.”
And it was true. Somewhere between age twelve and now, the connection between them had been broken. Maybe it happened to all fathers and daughters. He didn’t know. And maybe the connection could be re-established—perhaps even stronger than ever. He didn’t know that either.
The child in the picture had the beginnings of the beauty she’d display as a teenager, but still in a little girl’s round face. Her hair hung in abandon around her shoulders, a gentle tangle of natural curls.
Melanie never did cut her hair short, he suddenly thought. As soon as it grew out long, Melanie had kept it that way. The pixie style came and went on the heads of other little girls in Joy’s class, but his daughter’s hair was always long.
Princess had pried her eyes away from the dog-eared nine-year-old and sat gazing with something like surprise at the pre-pubescent child of twelve.
I’d love to get inside her head and hear what she’s thinking!
No, that would probably be a bad idea, a very bad idea. He suspected that in the swirling purple dark of Princess’s mind lurked indescribable demons no man would want to face.
He waited, let her stare. Then finally dealt his final card. This was the only picture not in black and white. They’d just this year started taking class photos in color.
“Here’s this year’s picture, taken last fall.”
Princess gasped and her hand flew to her mouth. She spoke for the first time, though he wasn’t entirely certain she was talking to him.
“Oh, my, but she is beautiful. I think she’s the most beautiful little girl—no, she’s not a little girl. She’s a young woman, a beautiful young woman…with red hair just like her daddy.”
She looked up at him then and smiled. Time moved forward on the track again, slowly, not quite up to speed yet, grinding a little but no longer suspended.
“I do not have words fine enough to thank you for what you’ve done for me today,” her voice was a whisper on a breath, soft and earnest. “You need to know a woman’s gonna die content because of your kindness.”
“Well, I didn’t do … it was noth—”
“Don’t you go brushin’ it aside like you ain’t done something special. It was kind and noble of you to spend time with a stranger you know’s done the terriblest thing a person can do. That kind of goodness don’t come from a man’s heart less’n he knows pure love—both give it and had it give to him.”
Like so many things Princess said, that hit Mac between the eyes. But she wasn’t finished with him.
“An’ while I got your whole attention, I want to know what you and …” She reached for the picture of Joy, the recent one, in color. But she stopped before she touched it, drew her hand back and merely gestured toward it. “… and the beautiful young woman in that picture had to say to each other when you had your heart-to-heart talk last night.”
Mac felt like he’d been hauled into the principal’s office and was about to try to convince him the dog had eaten his homework.
“We didn’t talk.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, why not?”
“She was sick. She locked herself in her room with a headache and didn’t come out all night.”
“And you just let her stay in there like that?”
“What was I supposed to do? Kick the door down? She’s sixteen years old, and that’s old enough—”
“To get yourself in a powerful lot of grownup trouble.” Her voice got quiet, humming with power. “It gets stronger every day, every hour, the knowin’. The knowin’ that something’s wrong and your little … your daughter’s scared and torn up inside over it.”
She reached across the pictures to Mac’s hand on the table, took it in both of hers and squeezed it. Her hands were warm and surprisingly soft. Her grip was tight.
“You look at me.”
Mac fixed his eyes on her purple eyes, an outlandish shade of color you could drown in.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with your Joy, but it’s a bad thing and it’s gettin’ worse. She’s scared plum to death of somethin’, and her insides is all tore up with wantin’ and wishin’ and regrettin’ and just hurtin’. She misses her mama, that’s true. But this trouble’s not ’bout that. You got to talk to her. You got to help her. Her mama can’t help her now. You’re all she’s got.�
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Mac found that it took all his strength to wrench his gaze away from hers, far more than it took to pull his hand away and gather up the photos.
Without looking at her, he said, “You frighten me, you know that Princess? You really scare me.”
“Good. If scarin’s what it takes to get you to do what you need to do.”
“Oh, it’s not just about Joy. You aren’t who you should be.”
“And who’s that?”
It slipped out before he could stop it. “A cold-hearted murderer.”
She looked like he’d back-handed her. He felt her reel backwards from the force of the blow, felt the glow about her dim as she cloaked it protectively. And he realized he could only see the light because she had totally opened up to him, had been completely vulnerable. The room seemed suddenly darker, colder.
“I am a convicted murderer and that’s a fact, and come Friday, they’re gonna fry me for it. Sorry I ain’t acted like what I am.”
“See, Princess, that’s the problem. There’s no guile in you. You have acted like who you are. It’s just that who you are doesn’t fit at all with what you’ve done.”
Princess smiled a little. “You know, that’s ’xactly what that lawyer lady said to me. The one that didn’t make hardly no sense a’tall.”
Chapter 15
Gary was at the gym door waiting for her when Joy got there at 3:30. He held out an envelope, then pulled it back when she reached for it.
“Say please.”
“This isn’t a game, Gary,” she hissed and held out her hand palm up.
Gary’s face bore a look she’d never seen before, because if she had, she’d never have been foolish enough to believe his fake comfort and phony sympathy. That look was cruelty, and it wasn’t a mask. It was reality; the sweet smile was the mask.
“What this is costing me is a cherry set of glass-packs that I’ve been saving for since last fall,” he said. “But what it’s going to cost you, baby-cakes, is something money can’t buy.”
His words were so much more true than he had any idea. She’d felt it again and again in the past few days. It was absolutely undeniable. She had felt the life inside her move.
