Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  “I got seven more years.” Tamara was desperate for him to understand. “When I’m too old for juvie, they’ll move me to the adult prison. You know what it’ll be like there? I don’t know if I’ll ever get out.”

  He frowned. “You will get out. Parole in a year, or possible release in two. They’d rather have you out of the system than have to transfer you to adult. So they will get you outside, if they can. You’re not going to be in prison for the rest of your life. Even if you served your full ten, that’s not forever. It might feel like it to you, right now, but it isn’t. You will get out.”

  Tamara shook her head. The hole she was falling down… she would be gone long before her term was up.

  “Are you thinking about suicide?”

  Tamara brought her hands up to her face and rubbed her eyes, the bridge of her nose, and her temples. Everything hurt. She was so wrung out.

  “No.” There was no way she was letting them put her on suicide watch. If she wasn’t already going crazy, that would do it for sure. Having someone watching her all the time in an observation cell, logging her every fifteen minutes, it was enough to put even a sane person over the edge. “I wouldn’t do that. I just… don’t see a way out.”

  Zobel straightened up, no longer leaning on the door frame. “You have a choice,” he said. “You don’t have to let yourself be blown around by what everyone else does and by every impulse. You can fight this and become a stronger person. I know it isn’t easy… trust me, I know that… but you can get better. Things will get better, if you don’t give up.”

  15

  TAMARA THOUGHT THAT they were taking her to see Dr. Sutherland. Or maybe she was cracking up so obviously that they were going to take her to Psych, despite Tamara’s repeated insistence to Zobel that she wasn’t going to do anything to hurt herself. It wasn’t visitor day, so it wasn’t Mrs. Henson with more books. Tamara had told her on each visit that she didn’t need to keep coming. Tamara was getting along fine without her and it didn’t matter if she didn’t have any visitors. Even the books didn’t matter, though Tamara had been devouring them faster than Mrs. Henson could bring them.

  It was only when she was reading that Tamara felt like she was truly grounded in reality. That was the only time she could escape the dreams, the flashbacks, and the hallucinations. Only when she was living in her mind completely that she no longer felt like she was teetering between reality and insanity.

  But she told Mrs. Henson that the books didn’t matter. That she didn’t need to keep coming to visit and bringing them.

  It was hard to keep the flashbacks hidden from Mrs. Henson. Many days, she called for the guard to end the visit early, knowing she wasn’t going to be able to hold it together. Mrs. Henson looked hurt when Tamara wouldn’t stay, but she did her best to give Tamara her space. She wasn’t, as Tamara continued to remind her, Tamara’s mother.

  Other people were less likely to notice the flashbacks. Tamara did the guided relaxation exercises with Dr. Sutherland and told him it was helping and she was feeling better. And when she was in a session, she did feel a little better. The relaxation exercises were good for a while. Once she left his office, the benefits fled. By the time she was back to the housing unit, it had all slid away and she was again fighting her demons.

  She stayed in her room, away from the common areas, as much as she could, reading and rereading her books, pacing, sleeping, and when she was too exhausted to fight them anymore, lost in wildly distorted flashbacks and imaginings.

  She had an uneasy truce with Lewis and the Sharks. Tamara thought by the way Lewis looked at her that she suspected Tamara had something to do with Tabby’s and Waterson’s deaths. While the security staff knew that Tamara had been in the hallway close to the time of the apparent duel to the death, Tamara said that she had just gone to the john, and the footage didn’t prove otherwise. All of the action in the corridor was off-camera. Maybe Lewis knew what the security tapes showed, and maybe she didn’t, but it seemed she suspected enough to tell her girls to just leave Tamara alone. She wouldn’t want the Sharks getting picked off one at a time whenever Tamara could cut them away from the pack.

  “Where am I going?” Tamara demanded, when Kirk didn’t take the turn for Dr. Sutherland’s office, but instead kept going straight.

  “You have a visitor.”

  “It’s not visiting day,” Tamara pointed out.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  They walked through a few hallways before Kirk spoke again. “Lawyers don’t have to wait for visiting day.”

  “Lawyers?” Tamara shook her head. “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “You’ve been assigned one.”

  Tamara was slowing down. Kirk reached back to grab her arm and hustle her forward.

  “A lawyer for what?” Tamara thought first of Tabby and Waterson. But she hadn’t been charged with anything in relation to their deaths. It wasn’t anything to do with Corinne’s and Julie’s deaths, because Tamara had already been convicted of those and was serving out her term. No need for a lawyer.

  “I’m not privy to your legal matters,” Kirk said dryly.

  “But…”

  “I’m sure when you get there…” he dragged her forward again, “…he’ll tell you what it’s all about.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “Go and meet him. If you don’t want him to represent you and want to go back to your room, you just say so, and we take you back. But you don’t know if you don’t meet him in the first place.”

  “Let go.” Tamara yanked irritably on her arm and he released her.

  She kept up with his long strides with difficulty. He was probably hurrying because he was irritated with her questions. Tamara’s body felt unaccountably slow and clumsy. Maybe coming down with a cold or flu. Tamara went through a final security check to ensure she didn’t have a weapon and then was taken into the room where she would meet her lawyer.

  It was a few minutes before he was escorted into the room. Tamara studied him. He was about what she expected, a white man in a suit with a shiny black briefcase which had undoubtedly been searched before being allowed in. He was younger than she would have thought, but she supposed they gave the grunt work to the newbies who were still trying to earn their stripes. Let them make their mistakes on the cases that didn’t matter.

  “Tamara? Hi, I’m Bron Ritter. I’ve been asked to stand as your counsel in matters coming up on the court calendar in the next few weeks.”

  He put his hand out. Tamara didn’t shake it. “We’re not supposed to touch.”

  “Oh.” He dropped his hand to his side, face getting red. “Right.” He pulled out the other chair noisily and sat down. He gave her a forced smile, expectant.

  “What court cases?” Tamara asked, rubbing the place between her eyebrows where a headache was already starting to pulse.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Hasn’t anyone talked to you before this?”

  “No.” Tamara didn’t think anyone had mentioned court to her. She would have remembered if someone had told her she was going to court.

  “Ah. Well…” Ritter started busying himself with files from his briefcase, not looking at her. He laid the files out and flipped through them, as if he weren’t familiar with the details. “The first one is an action against a Mr. Denny Baker for child molestation. You and his wife are the primary witnesses in that case.”

  He paused to look at her for her reaction. Tamara stared back at him.

  “I gotta testify against Mr. Baker?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s correct. You are one of the witnesses against him.”

  Tamara’s stomach lurched. She held her arms across it. “What?”

  “You are an eyewitness. Aren’t you?” He was starting to sound less certain of himself, worried by her reaction.

  Tamara wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “Yeah.” Her voice came out in a forced whisper. “Yeah, I’m a witness.”

  “You gave a stateme
nt to the police.”

  “Did I…?”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “No one has come out to talk to you about it since then?”

  “No.”

  “I’m surprised that neither side has come to depose you, get your full story firsthand.”

  Tamara shook her head. “Who do you act for?” If he were defending Mr. Baker, she was out of there.

  Ritter held up his hands in a calming motion. “I don’t act for the prosecution or the defense. I have just been appointed to make sure that you have legal advice and someone looking out for your interests.”

  “Oh.” Tamara had never heard of that before. She’d watched plenty of courtroom dramas on TV and thought there were only two sides in a criminal trial.

  In her own trial, the public defender had tried hard, but as far as Tamara was concerned, hadn’t done anything for her. Not that she helped much in her own defense. Everybody knew she had done it. She never took the stand. She spent most of the trial with her head down on the table, blocking it all out. She didn’t talk with her lawyer. She didn’t look at anyone in the courtroom or doodle or fidget. She was mentally as far away from there as she could possibly manage.

  “Tamara.”

  Tamara returned her attention to the room, Ritter staring across the table at her, wondering why she had stopped responding to him. Tamara swallowed and cleared her throat.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About the case?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I need you to say focused here. I don’t have a lot of time to spend with you, and I want to make sure we cover all of the main points. We can deal with some details in the next few weeks, but since I don’t know how much I’ll be able to meet with you, I want to hit the big stuff first.”

  “Okay.”

  “From what I understand,” his eyes again dropped to his papers instead of looking at Tamara, which was fine with her, “you are here because you were convicted of killing the Bakers’ two children.”

  “Yeah.” Tamara’s vision blurred. Glock had told her that if she talked about what had happened, Tamara would be able to put it behind her, to stop having the flashbacks and be able to move on in her life. But it hadn’t worked that way. It didn’t matter if she talked about it or not, she couldn’t erase the memories. Not the ones she wanted to. She took deep breaths, trying to focus on her surroundings and not let the flashbacks wash her away.

  “At the time you were arrested and tried for the murders, you never said Mr. Baker had done anything to them.”

  Tamara frowned and looked at him. “Why would I?”

  “Well… it might have come up.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “So you never told anyone three years ago that Mr. Baker had been molesting his children.”

  “No.” Tamara tried to come up with an explanation, but it was difficult for her to understand, let alone explain. “No one listened to anything I had to say. And… I always told myself he wasn’t doing anything to them. Only to me.”

  Ritter picked up a sheaf of pages in his file and tapped the edges on the table to square them.

  “I need you to be clear whether you thought he might be touching them, or whether you saw him touching them.”

  Tamara’s stomach rebelled. She sprang up from her chair and banged her fist on the door, calling for the guard. Ritter sat frozen, unsure what to do.

  A guard Tamara didn’t know well came to the door.

  “The can,” Tamara said urgently, gripping his arm. “I gotta go. I gotta go!”

  He made a motion to indicate he was going to handcuff her, but Tamara shook her head, looking up and down the hall. “Which way?”

  He pointed and started to speak. Tamara ignored whatever he was going to tell her about having to follow security protocols and dashed in the direction he indicated. She didn’t look back to see if he followed or was angry, she just ran, scanning for the restroom sign.

  Luckily, the door was not locked or alarmed and she made it to the nearest toilet before she lost her lunch, which was a better outcome than she had expected. She hadn’t even been sure she’d be able to get out of the meeting room before puking.

  She hated her body. Hated her brain. Hated herself for being so weak and so easily upset. At school, she’d always been the kid that would get motion-sickness on the bus when they went on a field trip. As soon as she got a hint of the flu, she’d be throwing up. And at juvie, it seemed that all it took was the right memory, and she was fainting or throwing up. She hated her body for being so weak.

  She didn’t hear the guard enter, but he was inside the restroom door when she eventually made her way out of the stall.

  “I’m sorry,” she snapped at him on her way to the sinks. “I couldn’t stop. Or I would have puked all over your shoes.”

  She splashed water on her face, rinsed her mouth, and soaked a folded-up pad of paper towels to put on the back of her neck.

  “You wouldn’t be the first one,” the guard said with good humor.

  Tamara looked over her shoulder at him. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t rush her through her oblations. Tamara concentrated on what she was going to say. If she had to testify against Mr. Baker, then obviously she was going to have to be able to tell the judge and jury what had happened. If she didn’t want to him to be released and go on to molest other girls, they had to be able to put him behind bars.

  “You want to go back in?” the guard asked her, when she finally turned off the taps and headed back for the door.

  “Yeah. I gotta do it.”

  “He can come back another day, if you’re too sick today. You could go back to your cell and go to sleep.”

  “No.” Tamara sighed. “It doesn’t matter when he comes, I’m gonna be sick. May as well get it over with.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s go.” He escorted her back to the meeting room, and Tamara reluctantly sat back down in her chair.

  Ritter’s eyes were wide. “Uh… are you okay?”

  Tamara pushed back against his baffled tone. “Would you be okay if some sicko raped you and got away with it, and then you had to go to court to tell them how he messed with his kids too? They’re not gonna believe me any more than you do.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t believe you.” He held his hands out in protest, his voice going up several notes. “I just asked you a simple question. Whether you saw.”

  “Yeah. I saw,” Tamara said stonily, folding her arms across her chest.

  “Okay.” He took a moment to write a note on his yellow legal pad. “If you saw, why didn’t you tell anybody when you became aware of it?”

  “Nobody believed anything I said,” Tamara insisted. “When I told them other things about Mr. and Mrs. Baker, they didn’t believe me. Didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. If I told someone he was messing with the kids, they’d have sent me here. Or Mrs. Baker would’ve beaten me. There wasn’t anyone who would listen.”

  “You don’t think that if you reported that he was sexually abusing his little girls that anyone would have investigated it?”

  “No. If they did, what would they find? Just touching isn’t going to leave any evidence. They were too little to tell. Corrine was three. Julie was just a baby.”

  “You said you had tried to tell about other things. What do you mean? Did you tell them about Mr. Baker abusing you?”

  Tamara shook her head. Her face got hot. Three years ago, she’d only been twelve. Still a baby herself. She remembered trying to work up the courage to talk to her teachers at school, her guidance counselor. They always said their doors were open. If anyone had anything they needed to talk about, they only had to ask. But that wasn’t how it had worked. When she skulked around the office, watching for an opportunity to talk to her counselor, the secretarial staff grilled her about what she was doing there. When she said she wanted to see her counselor, they said she had to schedule an appointment, he was too busy.
They wanted to know why she wanted to speak to him.

  When her math teacher kept her in after school for falling asleep during class, she had tried, one revelation at a time, to explain to him the situation she was stuck in. She didn’t get enough sleep because she had to take care of the babies at night. She had to take care of the cooking and the house cleaning. Mrs. Baker was working at night and Tamara had to take over all her duties. But the teacher had just rolled his eyes and told her that she needed to turn off the TV and get to bed in good time so that she’d get enough sleep. He was unsympathetic about her having to do work around the house, to babysit the kids. He’d had a part-time job when he was a teenager. It had been good for him, taught him responsibility. It was good that she was learning to be responsible too.

  When she refused to change for gym, the teacher had asked what was wrong. Tamara confessed that she didn’t feel well, but not that her body was so bruised and flayed that she couldn’t undress or put on shorts. They didn’t think she was really sick, insisting on a doctor’s note, or at least a parent’s note, but Tamara steadfastly refused, choosing instead to serve detentions.

  “What’s wrong, Tamara?” the gym teacher wheedled, wanting Tamara to change and join in on the volleyball lesson. “Is something wrong? You can tell me what’s going on, I won’t share it with anyone else.”

  Maybe she thought Tamara was just on her period or had a skin condition. None of them had considered that it might actually be something serious, something way beyond the scope of being ashamed of her body or having cramps.

  “I’m not feeling good,” Tamara whispered, holding her stomach. “And I hurt my knee. Mrs. Baker said I should sit out.”

  “Maybe we should call Mrs. Baker to confirm that.”

  “No!” Tamara swallowed. “You can’t call her. She works nights. She’s asleep right now. You can’t wake her up or…” she trailed off, not able to name what Mrs. Baker would do to her.

  “Then you’re not really hurt or sick, are you?” the teacher asked with a knowing smile. “If you were really hurt or sick, you would have a note from the doctor or your mother.”