They stood on the steel flatbed, and the cold from the metal came up through the soles of Miranda’s patent leather shoes. Behind them was a gas station; every now and then, a little bell dinged as a car ran over the black tubes that snaked across the pump area. The air smelled like gasoline and the hot cider being dosed out from thermoses by the Greene for Congress ladies. Miranda tucked her chin down into her coat collar and shivered, waiting for her cue: “And what will the current inflation rates mean for our children?” At this, her father would turn to her. She shouldn’t be picking her nose or scratching her bottom in her itchy tights. She should straighten up with a serious and thoughtful expression on her face that said, I am nine years old and I am worried about what inflation will mean to my future.
Her father would turn to her—his head would turn to her, anyhow, though his body still stayed square to the audience. His face would crinkle into this funny, almost sad little smile, and he would just look at her for an instant. Then his voice would drop, like he was talking just to her in their living room, but it would still travel through the mike and go booming and echoing out across the Sears parking lot. “I think about a little girl named Miranda, who in the year 2000 will turn thirty-three. She wants to be a dentist.” Here, she would nod solemnly, and an appreciative chuckling would ripple through the crowds. “And why shouldn’t she have her American dreams? I just want to make sure she and every other kid with that kind of good character and determination has a chance to see those dreams come true. . . .”
Then her dad was off on his river of words, the same words each time, drifting away. The weak light would be bleaching the sky. The tips of her fingers hurt in the little white gloves, her toes burned when she wiggled them. She started hopping from one foot to the other, till a hand came gently, firmly down on her shoulder, urging her to be still. Her mother’s hand, gone ghostly with the cold, the big diamonds looking dull beneath this dirty slush sky.
She tried to listen for Amy’s part—“My older daughter, Amy, came home from school one day asking if it were true, what she had heard at school, that the Soviets could kill every American twenty times over—why would they want to do that, Daddy? she asked me”—because when he got to that part, it meant he was nearly done and she and Amy could pile back into the station wagon and Mom would take them to the make-your-own-sundae bar at that red-roofed cafeteria near the mall. Miranda clenched and unclenched her freezing hands and stared out at the smudgy red faces in the crowd, the fidgeting bodies, the people on the fringes who broke away, uninterested, and walked off toward their cars. Those uninterested breakaway people wounded her. She felt ashamed for her father when they turned their blank backs on him and walked away.
Finally the speech came to its end, a bit of applause swirled through the field of people like a stray gust of wind through long grass, and the crowd began to scatter. She and Amy jumped off the edge of the flatbed trailer and collected the green signs that lay here and there on the blacktop and tossed them into the way back of the station wagon. She could already taste the hot caramel sauce, warm and slippery as it oozed across her tongue.
She had played out her part on the flatbed stage, just like girl actresses on TV pretend to laugh or cry. She wasn’t really worried about the future. She wasn’t worried about inflation, whatever that was, or the Soviets killing them all twenty times over.
In fact, she was only worried about one thing, and that thing didn’t happen—not then, at least, not in the freezing November of 1976, that first time he ran for office, when all the kids in her school had the green-and-white “Greene” stickers pasted onto their textbook covers made out of grocery bags, when she acted her part on the flatbed stage, when her mother still looked happy when she smiled and shook hands and waved, when she was nine and she held her dad’s hand in the voting booth and their picture was on the front page the next day and the headline made Dad shake his head in wonder. She had only one worry, during all that time: she worried that her father, who had stood up in front of all those people and asked them to like him, would lose. And everyone would see him lose, including her. And that then things would never be the same.
ONCE, WHILE ASLEEP, SHE DREAMED OF FRANK LUNDQUIST BENDING over her bed. She saw an inflection of light as his shadow fell across her face. She felt a corner of his jacket brush along her arm. This seemed quite real. She thought his breathing sounded jagged. She wanted to talk with him, but couldn’t pull herself out of the freeze of sleep. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. I wronged you. I know you wanted to help me. I wish you well.
Her romance with the notion of being alive did not dim as the last of the medication ebbed from her bloodstream. On the third day she was driven back to Milford Basin in a black Ford van with tinted windows and a square-headed guard resting an automatic rifle across his lap. Her hands were bound by plastic cuffs, the Caribbean CO (Officer Aaron Smythe, from the island of Nevis, she’d learned) escorted her to her seat with formal disdain. She didn’t care. She thought she might swoon from pleasure when the sun’s rays stroked her face as she walked the few steps from the hospital entrance to the van. The trees had gone blowsy with July along the winding roads of the Hudson Valley, and the wildflowers blossomed in a thick, intricate blanket draping the shoulders of the parkway. They crossed the Tappan Zee; the river looked to her like cold tea, the hills dark green above it. Miranda soaked up these sights with the same intense wonder she had once felt looking at a man’s face during a pristine moment of bliss.
The fat coils of razor ribbon glittering atop the chain-link fences made her heart dip a bit, though, as the van rolled down the hill and stopped at the barred entrance to the prison. The square lookout tower with its reinforced glass, the low brick buildings, the ruthlessly trim grass, the strange silence. All unchanged since the day she had arrived there the first time, just over two years before. My life still presents a problem, Miranda thought. How do I live it?
The door was slid open with a harsh roar. Miranda couldn’t move. “Let’s go,” said the flat-topped CO, and he shoved her a bit as she clambered out of the van, and with her hands bound, she stumbled before catching her balance. She felt scalding tears gather but she wouldn’t let them fall. She took a deep breath and allowed herself to be led inside.
“Goddamn, you gave me a fright.” Beryl Carmona was leaning against the reception desk, eating a plum. “You okay now?” She truly looked concerned. “I’m due home, but when I heard they’d be bringing you in, I stuck around to see.” She tossed the pit into a trash can and wiped her hands on her trousers. “You won’t want to try that again, will you?”
“I will not.”
“Good. Because you really add something to this place.”
Miranda had to smile at that. “I do my best.”
“You’ll be under observation for a while. But you’ll be back in the unit before you know it. Won’t get your cell back, though, Missy May. Your girlfriend Watkins got that.”
Dorcas Watkins in her spot. She had the bath mat, too, most likely. Oh, well. It hardly mattered. What mattered was this: Miranda was alive. The other issues would solve themselves, eventually.
A FOREST OF VINE-SHROUDED TREES CROWDS THE FENCE AT THE northeasternmost corner of the Milford Basin grounds. Just inside the fence crouches a small gabled cottage, brick with white trim, once a groundskeeper’s residence for the estate. A snug Tudor pile, something out of Beatrix Potter. It is now the Psychiatric Satellite Unit.
The evening of her return, Miranda stood at the barred rear window of the Psych Sat’s ground floor, watching the forest darken. Behind her stretched a row of six beds, made up in white sheets and pilled blankets—the dormitory where she would be housed “under observation.” She marveled at the play of the breeze in the trees. This was certainly the best view of any unit in the prison.
“There’s dead people in that wildness,” said the teenager who occupied the bed next to hers. “Don’t look out there.” She wore thin gold hoops and her hair fell around them i
n lustrous swoops. She sat on her bed nibbling a Peppermint Pattie. “I noticed a fucking dead person out there.”
“Really.” Miranda studied the girl’s heart-shaped face, petal-like tawny skin, and huge brown eyes. “How old are you?”
“Why do you care how old I am?” the girl said, with a shrug. She couldn’t disguise a small smile, though. Miranda saw that she was flattered by the attention. The girl continued to gnaw on the candy, turning the pattie around and around, taking minute bites from its edges. She stared at Miranda the entire time, as if she might try to grab her treat.
“You’re called Miranda, right?”
Miranda nodded. “What’s your name?”
The girl studied her. “I know how come you’re here in the Sat,” she said after a moment. “You tried to OD on yourself.”
Miranda bent to slip off her sneakers. “When’s dinner in here?”
“This motherfucker on my unit bugged out and bit me is why I’m here. And she said she gave me her AIDS and I’ll die, right? And my CO, he told me I’m lying?” Her coffee-drop eyes glittered with the memory. “So I fucking freaked and set my cell on fire.” She sighed exhaustedly and lay back on her bed. “They bring the food at, like, four thirty. And don’t expect Pepsi. They think Sat ladies are, like, too crazy to drink Pepsi.”
“I guess I can live without Pepsi,” said Miranda.
The girl licked a last splinter of chocolate off her thumb. She flopped on her side, propped her head with a bent arm. “God does not allow people who OD on themselves to be with him. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I forgot.”
The girl rolled her eyes and let out a bemused snort. “You forgot?” she said. “That’s the kind of shit you shouldn’t forget.” She rolled onto her back again and gazed up at the ceiling, arms pillowing her head. “That motherfucker on my unit was lying. Deputy super told me, she’s not carrying even a single speck of AIDS.”
AFTER THE FOUR O’CLOCK COUNT SHE GOT THE UNIT’S CO, A BOW-LEGGED woman name-tagged Jessop, to take her to the phone, which hung in a narrow alcove, once a coat closet, near the cottage’s original entry. The closet door had been removed; a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. Miranda called her mother collect.
After Barb Greene accepted the charges, she began to sob. Miranda felt tears accumulating in her eyes as well, that heaviness at the base of her neck and chest. A full minute of crying on the other end of the line. Miranda stared through the burning blur in her own eyes at the wall, its thick green paint scored and scratched. By claws? By the nails of women trying to paw their way out of the Sat, through the phone lines, into the world of the living again?
“I am so sorry, Mom.”
Finally, her mother spoke. “Let me conference in your father,” she said. “I promised him.”
The line went silent for a moment. Then a clicking, and her father started right in. “Why did you do it, Miranda, I mean I can guess why but you know we’ve got your appeal going—”
“My attorney said I should be realistic about my chances with that.”
“Christ, that asshole,” said Edward Greene.
“Edward, please. Alan believes in honesty,” said Barb. There was a silence. The three of them knew that, if it hadn’t been for the rather dramatic and delicate circumstances of the call, Barb likely would have added a zinger here—More than I could ever say for you, or some other line honed to a sharp point over many years.
“Miranda, please don’t ever endanger yourself like that again.”
“Your father’s right. Please, please don’t give up hope, darling. You will get out of this somehow.”
“I wish I could believe that.” Miranda traced the claw marks with a finger.
“It would have killed us if you . . . if they hadn’t found you. First your sister—”
“I know. It was wrong. I was just . . . desperate.”
Her mother was sobbing again. “I need to see you. How soon can you get visits, dear?” she said.
“They told us not while you were under observation. How long is that typically, do you have a sense for that, darling?”
“I heard maybe a month. Depends, I guess.”
Jessop rapped her knuckles on the door frame by Miranda’s head. “Time,” she said.
“I gotta go,” said Miranda.
“You have to promise us . . .” Her father’s voice cracked. “Please, please don’t ever do anything, try anything again.”
Finally, her tears began to fall. “I promise. Believe me. I promise.” She said good-bye to them and hung up. She wiped her eyes, then noticed some letters scratched into the wall just above the telephone. Hope was here.
AND MIRANDA DID HOPE. SHE COULDN’T EXPLAIN IT, BUT SHE DID. SHE lay awake that night, listening to the snoring and whimpering of her Sat mates and thinking about how she could help them, about how much she had to give. She made plans. When she was sent back to population, she would volunteer for the literacy program. She would sign up to do bed watches at the hospice.
At some point in the blackest pocket of the night, she woke. Rolled onto her side, stared out at the woods, a band of shadow beyond the brightly lit geometries of the perimeter fence. Dead people in the trees.
I’m so sorry, Amy. Please forgive.
At age thirteen, on the night of Amy’s flight, Miranda had been granted a gift, the gift of extra life. The life that continued after her sister’s ended. But then she became so cavalier, so careless about it. When, and why? She had, at some point, begun to treat it as a hand-me-down that might be shrugged off—dropped on the street, left in a taxi, lost forever without much consequence.
Take the case of Nicky, for example. When she’d tried to break it off with him, Nicky flipped—he had his arm around her neck, he nearly killed her. She couldn’t believe this was how her life would end. So cheaply, a story for local broadcast news. Finally Nicky turned her loose, grabbed his coat, slammed the door behind him. He still wrote her letters from time to time, heartfelt missives with atrocious spelling. Why had she let it go so far?
Why?
Why not?
Dominick Scorza represented the pinnacle of her years of “why not.” Why not take an Argentinian tourist from the nightclub home to her bed? Why not try the drug that a giggling girl had slipped her at a party? Why not? It was a period in which she could not think of a good answer to the question. She had broken up—painfully—with her holdover college boyfriend, she was newly twenty-four, financially stable, unattached and healthy, and could not think why she shouldn’t just do anything that came to mind.
Why not, after all? Why not?
The preparations for her cousin Gaby’s wedding, the first in the family’s younger generation. An event. A milestone. This was February 1992. Gaby and Aunt Ruth chose bridesmaid dresses of ivory satin: boat neck, cap sleeves, sweeping tea-length skirt. They ordered the gowns from a proudly venerable shop on Madison Avenue, a padded chamber of thick gray velvet, where the saleswomen were all lofty and fair, wielding pearl-handled pens with which they recorded customers’ measurements in leather-bound books. Miranda came to the shop for her fitting one evening after work. The shop was mostly empty. A languid saleswoman, hair the color of white wine, took charge of her, easing Miranda’s coat off her and hanging it carefully. At the back of the shop stretched a bank of angled mirrors, curving around three round raised platforms. Having slipped on the gown in a curtained alcove, Miranda was led to the center platform. A woman with pins in her mouth kneeled on a cushion at Miranda’s feet and made chalk marks at the hem. The saleswoman moved around Miranda’s back and gathered the loose bodice. “A bit more snug and a tad more cleavage,” she murmured. “You see?”
Miranda did see. She forgave Gaby for asking her bridesmaids to shell out two hundred dollars a pop. The seamstress smiled up at Miranda’s reflection. “Good color for you,” she said. The salesgirl let the bodice fall loose again, and it slipped down to reveal most of her black bra. “Think about wearing
your hair up,” said the white-wine goddess, deftly twisting Miranda’s long locks into a coil and pinning it up with a pair of hairpins she’d pulled from a pocket. Miranda noticed a man moving at the fringes of the reflection in the mirror. She tried to pull the gown’s neckline up a bit. “Don’t move,” barked the seamstress.
The man was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. He wore an enormous hooded Chicago Bulls jacket, red and black, a flattop cut. In the mirror, his reflection stared at Miranda’s reflection with dark eyes. He moved slowly out of the mirror’s range and disappeared.
“Dominick,” cried out an accented woman’s voice from a back room. “You are back from break?”
“Yeah, Ms. B. What you got?”
“Go down to stock. Two crates just come in from the airport. And please don’t stay out so long next time, mister.”
By the time the seamstress had finished her work and Miranda was dressed in her own clothes again, the street door had been locked and the lights dimmed. The saleswoman let Miranda out. “We’ll deliver the dress in four to six weeks,” she said.
The street had emptied, a frigid wind made her clutch her coat. She rushed for the subway entrance. Hearing the train pulling into the station, she dashed down the stairs, purse banging her hip, barreled through the turnstile and onto the car. Someone else hurried on behind her, bumping her a bit as the doors closed. A male voice said, “Sorry.”
She turned, startled to see the stock boy at close range. His eyes were light brown, rimmed with green, his skin smooth. He loomed over her. She turned away, chose a seat in the nearly deserted car. He sat down across from her, rubbing a hand across a square, stubbled jaw. He gazed at her appraisingly, his long blue-jeaned legs splayed out toward the car’s middle. He wore tremendous, loosely laced work boots. She tried to avoid his eyes. She wished she had a book to read; she almost always carried a paperback in her purse, but tonight, of course, she didn’t have one.
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