For Good

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  It sounded rehearsed.

  “Do you really believe that?” Kristen said.

  Aubrey held the baby with the casual irritation of a teenager carrying her little brother.

  “I think you cared about Marydale,” Kristen added, hoping it was true. “I think you still do.”

  The little boy tugged at his mother’s shirt, and Aubrey grabbed the boy by the crown of his head and pushed him back.

  “Go play out back,” she said.

  The child protested.

  “Outside!” Aubrey barked.

  She stepped away from the door into the house, and Kristen moved into the space she had vacated. Wicker blinds hung over the windows, leaving the house in shadows.

  “I told her to handle him.” Aubrey sat down in an armchair in the cluttered space that passed for a living room. “It wouldn’t have killed her to flirt a little, make nice with Aaron until he forgot about us.”

  Kristen sat down on a folding chair, facing Aubrey. “Are you a lesbian?”

  Aubrey shrugged. “Doesn’t matter anymore.” She sniffed. “Marydale will get out sooner than I will. Look at this mess. She did fine for herself, right? She got out, went up to Portland.”

  “She’s in Holten Penitentiary right now on a parole violation. If she’s lucky, we’ll be able to get that down to three months. If she’s not, it’s half a year. If you know anything about the case…”

  “Fuck,” Aubrey said. “I thought she got out.”

  Kristen looked around at the clutter: boxes and children’s toys, a fake Christmas tree in one corner, dirty dishes in the tiny kitchen. On the wall, a younger Aubrey and a man—presumably Amos—grinned out of their wedding frame, their smiles strained.

  “I want to get her out. I want to get someone to look at her case again, to prove it was self-defense. Can you think of anything, anything at all, that would help Marydale?”

  The boy ran up to Aubrey again and clung to her waist. This time she put an arm around him.

  “I visited Marydale when she was locked up,” Aubrey said. “You’re from the city. You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Get what it’s like to be gay out here. Marydale ever take you down to the quarry?”

  “No.”

  “I guess she wouldn’t.”

  Kristen tried to keep her body relaxed, her face neutral. She had interviewed a thousand potential witnesses. From DataBlast. From the “environmentally friendly” chemical company that repackaged generic household cleaners with a hemp label. From a dozen other class actions. Talking had its own momentum, and everyone had an impulse to confess, but the inclination was skittish. The listener could scare it away by holding their pencil too tightly. She watched Aubrey without making eye contact.

  “We used to go swimming in the old quarry. It was clean, not like the Poison Well, but somewhere along the line they put a bunch of cement up to keep people out. You drove down this long road, and there were, like, a dozen dead end signs. Then this cement wall. For a while, all the kids thought they could find a way to tear it down. We’d shoot at it, and some of the boys made up a fertilizer bomb, but you couldn’t get through.”

  Kristen nodded, not yes, just I hear you.

  “That’s what it was like for Marydale, you know? Being gay around here. There were a couple of us at the high school. Me. Marydale. This kid name Cutty. And some others who never talked about it. She was the last one up against that wall, kicking at it, when you knew it wasn’t going to come down.”

  “I thought people accepted her,” Kristen said quietly.

  “Sure they did.” Aubrey wrapped her arm around the little boy and pulled him awkwardly onto her lap. The baby had fallen asleep, and the little boy touched the baby’s hand. “No one said you couldn’t go shooting at the wall. No one said you couldn’t try. But you weren’t ever gonna win.”

  “Why didn’t you leave Tristess?” Kristen asked.

  “By the time you’re old enough, Tristess has got a little piece of you.” Aubrey pressed her lips to the baby’s head. “I’m sorry Marydale got sent back. I thought she’d make it.”

  “Can you think of anything that might help her case?” Kristen asked again.

  Aubrey looked around with a frown. “Ronald Holten bought us this place. He got Amos a job, not that Amos kept it long. If you think the Holtens got something they shouldn’t have, look for the money.”

  But a week and a half later, Kristen had found nothing. Her visits to the small legal-consult room in the prison felt strained. The more often she visited, the closer the guards watched them. Quietly, she pleaded with Marydale, “You have to help me think of something.”

  Marydale pleaded back, “I can’t dodge Gulu much longer. I don’t know who her people are. I’m trying.”

  “Can you think of anything we can use?”

  The last time she had visited, Marydale had broken down, sobbing into her folded arms, the last vestiges of the rodeo queen dissolving with her tears. Kristen had promised herself she would not ask again, but now the question came back of its own will.

  “Marydale, anything?”

  Kristen wanted to hold Marydale. She wanted reach back in time to the seventeen-year-old girl waving from the parade float. She wanted to cradle that girl in her arms, and she wanted to strip Marydale of her orange scrubs and kiss her. But the guard’s footsteps marked time like a clock, and Kristen heard herself barrage Marydale with questions.

  “I thought you were looking!” Marydale shot back.

  “I’m sorry,” Kristen said. “I can’t find anything.” It felt like a diagnosis, a doctor walking slowly into the examining room. I’m sorry…Kristen took a deep breath. “The best I’ve got is that Eric Neiben was a shitty lawyer, and some people around town thought you got a rough deal.” Kristen’s laptop was open to a waiting screen, but there were no answers to type. “You’re going to have a parole hearing next week. That will determine whether you’ll be in prison for three months or six. I’ll try for three, and then I’ll try to get your parole transferred to Portland. You’ve got a support system and employment, so they may agree. If they don’t, we can try to sue for wrongful imprisonment, based on the fact that Ronald Holten knows you. We won’t win, but it might scare the county since I can try it for free, and they’ll have to pay. But that’s losing the war. We can’t bank on some small-town politician’s fears.”

  Marydale ran her hands through her hair. “I know. I know.”

  “Help me,” Kristen said. “There’s got to be something.”

  Outside the room, the guard’s footsteps receded on the linoleum.

  “Kristen.” Marydale traced a crack in the surface of the table. “You’ve never been in prison.”

  “No.”

  “I love you so much.” Marydale’s voice sounded far away. “But you don’t get it. We don’t win. We can’t. I can’t. I wasn’t mad at you. I want you to know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you left Tristess. I know why you left. I know what happens when someone goes into the system. If you leave now”—she straightened—”I’ll understand. This isn’t your life. You didn’t do this.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t hate you.”

  “If I leave?”

  “Eventually, you will. You have to. It’s over for me. This is all my life is going to be. This. Maybe I’ll be able to do something in Tristess. Maybe after enough time passes…”

  “You can’t give up.”

  Kristen clutched Marydale’s hand. Marydale pressed her other hand over Kristen’s.

  “Sweetie,” she said, as though Kristen were a little girl stomping her feet against death. “Sometimes you just lose.” Her smile was incalculably sad.

  “No,” Kristen said.

  “Yes. I’ve spent the last ten years pretending it’s not true, but it is. It just is.”

  Without thinking, Kristen rose, grabbed Marydale’s hand, and pulled her to her feet. T
he small window in the door watched them like an eye, but the hallway outside was momentarily empty. Kristen drew Marydale toward the corner of the room where a passing guard could not see them. Then she spun Marydale around and pushed her against the wall. Marydale’s eyes went wide. Kristen pressed her hands to Marydale’s cheeks, holding her face and her gaze.

  “Marydale, we’ll get through this.”

  Then her tongue was in Marydale’s mouth, their kiss fierce and hard. Kristen felt every sense heightened. The guards were only fifty feet away. She could hear them laughing, their muffled footsteps shifting around at the end of the hall.

  “I love you,” Kristen whispered.

  She kissed Marydale again. The material of Marydale’s uniform was so thin Kristen could feel her body as if through a sheet. She could feel Marydale’s heartbeat. She could hear the blood in her own ears. She felt her body light up with desire and grief and rage at the world. Without thinking, she squeezed Marydale’s ass, clinging to her, drawing her closer, tighter.

  “You can’t give up, Mary.”

  The wall behind them creaked. They both stopped.

  Through the wall, Kristen heard one of the guards say, “Is Rae done in there?”

  A woman’s voice replied, “Lawyer’s got another ten minutes.”

  Marydale pressed her forehead against Kristen’s shoulder. “I don’t want this to be your life, too.”

  Kristen clutched the back of Marydale’s head with one hand. With the other, she caressed her Marydale’s thigh, touching the thin, rough fabric of her uniform. Beneath it she felt the heat of Marydale’s body.

  “Listen to me, Marydale. You’re getting out. I know you are because I did. I should never have survived. I should be doing meth in some dive bar with my mother and her boyfriend and Sierra, too. I wasn’t supposed to go to college. I wasn’t supposed to be a lawyer, and I had to fight for everything…everything I have, and I will not lose now. I will not lose you.”

  She slipped her hand under Marydale’s waistband. A radio buzzed in the hallway, and someone answered with a curt, “What?”

  Warnings rang in the back of Kristen’s mind, but she had seen the defeat in Marydale’s eyes, and she couldn’t bear it: beautiful, regal Marydale with her blond curls and her dark tattoos sitting before her with her shoulders stooped. Sometimes you just lose. Even in Tristess, when Marydale was just a waitress scraping by on cheap tips, there had been a fierceness about her, a cut of blue stone in her eyes, a flame that burned lower and lower every time Kristen visited the penitentiary.

  Kristen felt that heat rekindle as she touched Marydale’s thigh.

  “Oh,” Marydale whispered. She closed her eyes. “Oh, Kristen.”

  Kristen rubbed the tips of two fingers against Marydale’s clit, more a symbol than a seduction, a witch’s invocation, an ancient liturgy.

  “I won’t fail now,” Kristen said, her voice stern but her touch gentle. “I won’t fail you, if I have to take this to the Supreme Court, if I have to burn this whole fucking town to the ground.”

  Marydale stood motionless, her legs spread, her muscles tight. Kristen felt her attention perfectly divided between Marydale’s body and the sound of voices at the end of the hall. She listened, her fingers moving over Marydale, sliding up and down beside her clit, then dipping into her body, then rubbing quickly and lightly over her whole sex.

  “Trust me, Marydale.” Kristen could feel Marydale’s legs tremble. Kristen didn’t dare kiss her, because she couldn’t take her attention from the door, the hall, the sounds, the footsteps.

  The footsteps! Suddenly they were close.

  A guard said, “We’ll need the room for Brosch.”

  He was right outside the door. She could hear his keys. Kristen pulled away. Marydale looked as shaken as Kristen felt.

  “They’re coming,” Kristen hissed.

  Marydale rushed for her seat, dropping into it as the guard appeared at the doorway. Kristen thought she could smell Marydale’s sex in the air. Her hand was slick with moisture from Marydale’s body, her face flushed, her breath ragged. Still, she had not clawed her way into the best law firm in Portland for nothing.

  She turned slowly, as she would in court, knowing exactly how to pose.

  “Yes?” she asked the guard who had appeared in the doorway. “I’m with my client.”

  She knew in that instant they had staged the perfect tableau. The inmate slightly flustered, trying to guess the right answer to a question that had no solution. The attorney losing patience, starting to think about her next case, perhaps unnerved by being in a prison, but hiding it well. Their intimate distress translated into the awkward flush of strangers about uncomfortable business. Kristen turned her back to the guard. We will win, she mouthed. Marydale nodded, but Kristen couldn’t tell if it was desire or defeat that darkened Marydale’s eyes like the smoke from wildfires at night.

  Kristen drove back to her motel and paced her room for an hour, then walked over to the Heavenly Harvest, where she was to meet Grady. She waited, staring out the window. Main Street looked even grimmer than the day before. Lifetime supervision, she thought. Forever. She had promised Marydale that they would win, but good attorneys knew never to make promises like that. She remembered her torts professor declaring, The law is a blunt instrument. If you want justice, look to God. If you want rules, look to the law.

  Grady slid into the booth across from her, interrupting her thoughts.

  “City food!” He picked up a menu. “You probably like this stuff. What is pecorino anyway?”

  “Cheese,” Kristen said wearily.

  “Ah, it doesn’t matter,” Grady amended. “What have you got on Marydale’s case?”

  “I told her we’d win.”

  “You find something?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why’d you tell her…?”

  “I can’t let her lose again, but with Ronald Holten in charge of parole…” Kristen trailed off.

  “This town,” Grady said.

  A thin, early sun came through the windows, making Kristen’s eyes water and casting long shadows across the table.

  “How was she?” Grady asked.

  Kristen thought of Marydale’s hard, desperate kiss and the sadness in her eyes.

  “She doesn’t think she’ll get out, and she probably won’t. I lied to her. I couldn’t look her in the eyes and tell her to give up hope,” Kristen said. “She was seventeen. It’s not fair. Now she’s stuck. If she gets a traffic ticket or a PO who doesn’t like her, it’s back to this.”

  Across the street, Kristen saw Sierra exit one of the motel rooms. Somehow Moss, Frog, and Sierra managed to share a single room in perfect harmony, the men in one bed, Sierra in the other. They’d even decorated with a roll of Scotch tape and whatever maps and leaves and twigs they’d found in Tristess. It looked good in an odd, vegan co-op sort of way.

  “How’d you come out the way you did and your sister…?” Grady asked.

  Kristen squinted into the sun. Sierra had wrapped a green scarf around her dreadlocks. She had a drum slung over one shoulder and a laptop tucked under her arm. A second later, she burst through the door, waving at the hostess and sliding into the booth next to Kristen. She dropped the drum on floor with a resonant thud and opened her laptop.

  “Look at this!” she said.

  She whirled the screen around to show Kristen and Grady.

  “It’s your article about Marydale,” Kristen said.

  “Look at the header.”

  “You sent it to the Oregonian?” Kristen asked, noting the familiar script at the top of the screen.

  “The Associated Press picked it up.”

  “You’re part of the AP?” Kristen asked.

  Grady was watching Sierra like one might watch an interesting sea creature.

  “It’s gone viral.” Sierra hit a few keys. “Look at our website. We got more than thirty thousand hits. And look at the comments.” She pushed the computer back toward
Kristen. “People love her. They get it!”

  Kristen scanned the feed. There were a few of the usual Internet rants in all caps, but the majority of the comments were composed in full sentences and complete paragraphs. A man in Austin said his father had been imprisoned for being gay in the 1990s. A fifteen-year-old girl in Baltimore said she’d been sent to a juvenile detention center for six months for skipping school and creating a fake Facebook profile for the vice principal at her school. A woman in Tulsa told Marydale to keep her head up; a rodeo queen can do anything. A judge in Detroit wrote, It costs fifty thousand dollars to remand a felon to prison, and we’re sending people back for minor infractions like failure to report. If our schools could leverage that kind of money for at-risk youth, this would be a different country.

  “Don’t you see?” Sierra said. “People are ready for a change! They want to lock up the bad guys, but they don’t want to see people like Marydale go to prison for life. They don’t want nonviolent offenders sucking up resources. That money could go back to the community. We could build day care facilities and schools and nursing homes where young people take care of the elderly. We could…”

  Sierra went on. When she finally left with a breathless, “I’ve got to go to the prison and tell Marydale,” Grady and Kristen both watched her go, the drum bouncing against her hip.

  “I’ve never heard her play it,” Kristen said.

  “She still thinks she can change the world,” Grady said.

  For a moment, Sierra’s excitement had cheered Kristen. Now, in her absence, the air felt heavier.

  “She’s young,” Kristen said, still staring at the place where Sierra had disappeared into the motel across the street. “She’s a kid.”

  “Out here there are kids running the family ranch at eighteen,” Grady said. “There are kids running herd at sixteen. She’s old enough.”

  “To know better,” Kristen said sadly.