The Captives
Page 4
But no. No revisiting all that now. And I was not still that cringeworthy freshman. I scooped old Truffle into my lap and lightly scratched behind his molting ears. He tolerated this as I contemplated my reflection across the room, lifting and lowering my chin. I wasn’t unhandsome, perhaps, at age thirty-two. Women double-glanced on the street sometimes. I saw them, and I walked on by.
4
June 1999
The lime-green linoleum of the game room floor glimmered like a lake of antifreeze fluid. Someone had managed to set fire to a Scrabble board and the smoke had triggered the overhead sprinklers. Miranda and Lu swabbed up, pausing every now and then to rake wooden tiles out of the sopped string mop heads. They piled a wet alphabet on the windowsill.
“I found the zed,” said Lu.
Miranda looked up, startled by the sound of her voice. She’d been watching the strands of the mop slop around the puddled floor, wrinkling the water. She had been submerged in her end-of-life planning again. What would it be like to drown? Delightfully quiet, she imagined. What an appealing notion—after the ceaseless din of Unit 109C, Building 2A&B, to be suspended eternally in a cool, clear gelatin of silence. Problem was, the prison didn’t offer a wide selection of places to drown. You could try the toilet—clog it, fill it, dunk your head in—but she still had some pride. How about standing under the shower head with your mouth open, like a goose in the rain? Just let your innards fill up with the powdery-tasting shower water and then you’d topple over, dead?
She longed to be finished with the feelings. Such tired rubbed-raw feelings, grief and shame and regret. And the noise, the noise. An eternal silence brought on by water—yes, that would be an attractive way.
Miranda straightened up and leaned against the wall, let her mop rest against her collarbone. “Do you think you could drown yourself in the shower?” she said.
“First you must stop the drain. Then someone could hit your head,” said Lu. She paused in her work, adjusting her state yellows, which she’d altered with a contraband needle and tailoring skills bred in her Russian bones to fit neatly over her long and slender torso. “Someone could knock you down. Then you might drown like a baby in a little bit of water.” She pursed her carefully drawn red mouth (“put on leepstick, don’t be sad mouse,” she often scolded Miranda). Bent over her mop again and said firmly, “Alone this could not be done. You would need help. And who would you ask? Not me, because I wouldn’t do it.”
“April.”
“April would not do it. No way.” She wrung the mop into a blue plastic bucket with her pale, strong hands. She shook her head, letting out a sarcastic little guffaw. “April hit you over the head? Come on, Mimi.”
No one had ever called Miranda Mimi, but Lu did. She claimed that in Russian, Mimi means “little crow.” “And when you sit on your bed and look sad, with your shoulders all pinched, you look like one, too,” said Lu.
Jerrold Liverwell, the head CO of the second shift, appeared at the door. “Welcome, Officer,” Lu said.
“Hello, ladies. Better get moving, count is in ten.” He glowered at a line of plastic chairs, each molded seat cupping water, like a row of birdbaths. “I’d just love to know who did this shit.” He ran a hand across his close-shaven head, a handsome man, with a small paunch and dark, mottled skin like silver left to tarnish.
“Officer, how are we doing?” asked Lu, peering at him through her yellow bangs as she wrung the mop again. Miranda saw the guard glance her way.
“Not bad,” he said. “Ask me later.”
Ladies started yelling down the hall, and Liverwell cursed and disappeared in the direction of the row. Miranda and Lu worked without speaking for a while. Lu had a way of vanishing into herself, shifting to an impenetrable mode, an antigravity force that repelled all who approached. When Ludmilla sank into this state, Miranda grew a little panicky. Without her, without April, Miranda doubted if she could function. She never had been so dependent on anyone in her life. Not one of her boyfriends had been more essential to her well-being.
Perhaps Duncan McCray. Certainly none of the others.
But then she had never been a person who felt at ease by herself. This is why her time in the shoe had been such a special agony. When too much alone, her mind would drift toward trouble. Solitude had never been her strong suit.
Miranda could trace this way back. One day when she was about eleven, she dawdled home from school only to find the front door of the house open. The place was deserted. Her father was in Pittsburgh, campaigning for reelection. They all tagged along sometimes, when her sister and her mother and Miranda herself had to be onstage with him, but this day he went alone. He was in a bad mood. November was coming, his polls were way down, she had heard him screaming into the phone. Amy was maybe at a friend’s house, but where had her mother run to, leaving her purse? Her car was gone. (She didn’t find out until years later that Karsten Brunner, her mother’s lover, had a cardiac arrest that day.) She found a sink full of dishes in sudsy water, and her mother’s engagement ring with its big emerald-cut diamond and the wedding band etched with twirling vines were set in the little blue saucer on the sill, their customary place while dishes were being washed. Miranda climbed up on a footstool and stared at the rings. She put them on her hand—fourth finger, left hand, that was the place—and took a tour of the rooms of the house, the big brick house with its smell of old wood, so much bigger than their little one-story place in Pittsburgh. That house, you could hear everyone talking—the walls, Dad had said, were made of spit and Kleenex. This house all you heard were whispery creaks and echoes, like ghosts passing by your room.
Miranda heard those creaks as she climbed upstairs. Stopped at her parents’ flowery bedroom. Smells of shaving cream and those dark interesting perfumes, adult smells, heavy and almost sickening. The cluttered vanity table, the vast ruffled bed. The closet where, if you knew how to clamber up the shelves of sweaters, you could find The Joy of Sex under some old ski pants. Easily reached, if you were a good clamberer like Miranda. But she didn’t stop to see those drawings now, the ladies with the hairy armpits and the bearded men joined in various ways, wearing nothing but gentle smiles. She returned to the hall and continued along to Amy’s messy den, heaps of albums and secret notebooks in which she wrote poems that Miranda read on the sly and thought were really good. She brushed her hair, looking into Amy’s mirror, its glass half covered with “Greene for Congress” stickers.
Finally, to her own room, the best room with a view of the backyard and the fluffy blue carpet she had picked out herself. She stood at the window, staring out at the yard. Fall was definitely coming, a lot of the leaves were yellow and some were already down. Beyond the woods she could see the dull gray of the parkway, and beyond that the river.
Was that when she began to have a taste for the forbidden? She had never even thought of going to the river alone. The floor of the woods was moist and mulchy, fallen leaves gone black and sticky in the damp. She slid down the culvert to the concrete pipe that ran under the parkway, tall enough for her to walk through without bowing her head. Here were mangled tin cans, scraps of tires, and clumps of dead branches tangled with all kinds of trash you didn’t want to look too closely at. It could be that a serial killer had left someone’s fingers there, or there might be a dead bird. The cars rumbled overhead, a deep frightening roar that echoed through the pipe and penetrated her head like someone yelling in her ear. The concrete vibrated all around her as she hurried through.
She shot out the other side into an eerie quiet. One bird, calling over and over again, receiving no answer. A lonely sound. The woods here were bigger and cleaner. She followed a muddy path—there were other footprints there, whose?—down to a sandy lip where she had been once before with her father and Amy, one Sunday not long after they’d arrived in Washington and moved into the house. Dad had let Amy and Miranda bring the fishing poles they used to use at the lake place in Pennsylvania, and they sat there, dropping their lines in and re
eling them back out, while Dad smoked a cigarette and stared off down the river. He had just started smoking again and Miranda was mad at him for it. He said to give him some slack. He said he was under stress, because being a representative was a tough balancing act. They didn’t catch any fish, and after a while, they got hungry for lunch and left.
Now Miranda sat on a small rock where her father had sat that time. There were cigarette butts littered on the sand there, and she wondered if one of them might be his. She bent down and picked up one with the name of Winston, which was his brand. But she decided no—it had been almost two years since that day they’d gone fishing. She dropped it in the river and watched it float, spinning swiftly away.
About thirty feet out in the water was a huge split rock with a tree growing from its broken center. Miranda thought the rock looked like a giant cracked egg with a fuzzy chick’s head sticking out. The rock was covered with spray-painted messages in red, orange, white, and silver—left there by teenagers, she supposed. They had written names and hearts, and she saw the word fuck a lot, which was definitely the worst of all bad words, and Miranda could understand why they’d want to write it there, where their parents would probably not see it.
Sitting on this small rock on the riverbank, digging the toe of her sneaker into the sand, she wondered what would become of her if no one ever came home. How long would she be able to stay in her house, doing the cooking and the cleaning up, taking in the mail? Could she get the lawn mower started on her own? That would be key, because uncut grass was the giveaway—that’s how the neighborhood had found out that Mr. Semsker down the street had kicked the bucket. He lay in there, dead, until his grass grew long enough for someone to take notice. If she couldn’t pull that cord hard enough and get the mower going, surely she would be taken to an orphanage. And she knew from her reading—Daddy-Long-Legs, just for starters—that orphanages were dreadful.
Miranda noticed that a tall tree had fallen into the river, extending its branches nearly to the split rock. She went and investigated it, and she could see that its trunk was wide enough to walk on, and that you could shuffle out far enough to make a jump to the rock. Amy would have bossed her, told her to stop, but Amy wasn’t around, so Miranda clambered up onto the tree trunk, and holding the branches that stuck up on either side, moved out over the water. It was easy, actually. She got to the place where the tree dipped under the water and stopped. From here, it was just a giant step over to the rock, and she could see how to grab onto the slim trunk of the little tree growing in the crack and pull herself up to the ledge. She took a deep breath, held it, and jumped.
The rock was more slippery than it looked, but she did catch hold of the tree, and she was able to pull herself up. She sat there, her heart pounding, and felt a hot glow of self-satisfaction. Clearly, it was no accident that she was also the only girl in her grade able to do penny drops from the monkey bars. Clearly, she was talented.
In the heart of the broken rock, there was a little round plateau of sandy dirt, and here was where the tree had planted itself. Resting at its base were two empty bottles, Jack Daniel’s bottles with the familiar label she recognized from a T-shirt that Benjamin LeHargue had worn almost every day to school at the start of the year until Mrs. Yee told him it was inappropriate and asked him not to wear it anymore.
Many more names and messages were scrawled on the inner walls of the rock. Miranda leaned against them and dug into the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out the piece of chalk she always kept on her, in case of an impromptu hopscotch match. She squatted down and found a clean bit of rockface, close to the edge of the crack. She wrote her name. If she was taken to an orphanage, at least there would be some proof that she had once lived here, had a home, and a family.
She rose again and went to the other side of the little plateau, the one that looked out onto the wide river. The sound of the traffic on the parkway behind her was softer than the sound of the river before her. The water was black in some places, brown in others, and gave off a smell of rotting wood and moss. It was a dank and dirty odor, like the smell of the science classroom’s cloudy fish tank magnified by a thousand. But the wind that blew down the river was fresh, thought Miranda. You could tell that it had come down from the mountains, as the river itself had, if her father was to be believed. He had said the river bubbled up from a hole in the ground in the mountains of West Virginia.
Miranda briefly considered spending the night on the rock—wouldn’t that worry them and make them spoil her for a week and make them sorry that they had left her alone. But when she truly considered being out here in the dark, she grew scared. She scampered back over to the shore side, and, in a bit of a panic, leaped back to the big tree. She landed just fine on the trunk, and for an instant, she was congratulating herself again. Then her sneaker sole, worn thin from blacktop scraping, slid on the slick bark. She fell backward. Into the water.
And it was deeper than you would have thought. She sank all the way under, and still she didn’t hit the bottom. She bobbed back up to the surface, gasping with shock. The frigid cold of the water hit her all at once. She floundered wildly for a moment, her brain in a kind of wild freakout, her heart pounding so hard it made her gag. She grabbed hold of a branch that stretched out from the trunk and tried to pull herself back up onto the thick body of the tree, but she couldn’t—her arms were too weak. She just dangled there, kicking and whimpering, tasting the rotten water in her mouth, until the branch broke and she plunged back down into the darkness again.
When she surfaced this time, though, she was calm. She began dog-paddling to the shore, which was really only about ten yards away, though she had to get there slantwise, because of the stubborn current. When she was halfway there and her arms were getting very tired and heavy, she stretched her feet beneath her, and touched the mucky floor of the riverbed. She waded then, shivering, picking her way among boulders back to the banks.
When she got to the house, she could see immediately that it was just how she’d left it—empty, no lights on. She peeked into the window of the den—only the TV stared back at her, blank and gray. Hiding her wet shoes and socks in the milkbox, she slipped in the side door and up to her room. She was already in the shower, her soaked clothes shoved under her bed, when she remembered her mother’s rings. They were gone.
She thought about going back to look for them, but when she went to the window, she saw that it was nearly dark. She couldn’t make herself go back into those woods. She thought about the cigarette butt whirling away on the current and figured that those rings might be heading out to sea by now. There was no getting them back.
Heavy with the knowledge of her own impending doom, she slowly dressed and dragged herself downstairs. She was ravenous, and surely when somebody came home she would be sent to bed without dinner, so she took a pop-top can of chocolate pudding out of the refrigerator and walked like a condemned man down the three steps to the den. She turned the TV on to Channel 20 and sat down to eat her pudding while watching what would undoubtedly be her last episode of Scooby-Doo for months. Because what could be the penalty for drowning your mother’s diamonds in the river? A long exile from TV land, certainly, and other punishments that might even be worse.
Sometime later, she woke with a start. The den was dark, the television off. She rubbed her eyes, feeling cranky, and heard her father’s voice. She only remembered the rings when she stumbled into the bright kitchen to see his body on the checkerboard floor. His head was stuck in the cabinet under the sink. Amy was kneeling by his legs, bent over the open toolbox.
“Those are the pliers, Amy. I need the wrench.”
“What’s going on?”
“Mom lost her rings down the drain,” said Amy. “Isn’t that so tragic?”
“Where is Mom?”
“Upstairs.”
Her father’s voice sounded from beneath the sink. “Don’t bother her, Miranda.”
“She’s upset,” whispered Amy dramatically.
The three of them ate TV dinners around the kitchen table. “How much did those rings cost, Dad?” asked Amy.
Their father grimly cut his turkey slab. “A fuck of a lot,” he said. Amy and she exchanged wide-eyed stares. It was the first time they’d heard him use “fuck,” though it would be far from the last.
After they ate, Dad retreated to his study to talk on the phone, Amy to the TV room. Miranda sat at the kitchen table, staring at the sink, trying to figure things out. While she was sitting there, her mother came into the room, her eyes red-rimmed, in her robe and slippers. She went to the high cabinet and took a bottle of aspirin down, and she poured herself a glass of beer. She looked at Miranda. “When did you get home?” she said.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. Her mother gazed at her a moment, then turned and walked back out, carrying the aspirin and the beer. Miranda listened to her footsteps trudging up the stairs, and she was flooded with understanding. Her mother thought the rings had been stolen from the house, left with its door gaping open. Her mother didn’t want her father to know that she’d left the house with its doors swinging wide like an invitation for every masked burglar who happened by. Her mother didn’t want to get in trouble, so she’d told a lie. That was something Miranda could begin to understand.
Nothing was ever said about the jewelry again. Two months later, her father lost the election and his seat in the House. Three years later, Amy was dead, and two years after that, her parents’ marriage was legally dissolved. Miranda knew when their troubles began. It was the day she let her mother’s diamonds go drifting away.