The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Sheriff Jack has said nothing about me being let into a cell; I can see the detention officer thinking the same thing. If Andrew and I are going to have a traditional attorney/client visit, it is supposed to be upstairs in one of the conference rooms. Finally, she shrugs—if one lawyer gets strangled by his own client, the detention officers would probably consider it a good start. When she opens the barred slider, it grates, like fingernails on a blackboard. I step into the tiny space, and Doucette rams the door home behind me.

  Immediately, I jump. Even knowing I can leave at any time, it’s uncomfortable; there is barely enough room for one man, much less two. Andrew sits down on the bunk, leaving me a small stool. “What are you doing in here?” I ask quietly.

  “Self-preservation.”

  “I’m just trying to save you, too.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Andrew says.

  Time is elastic, in jail. It can stretch to the length of a highway; it can beat like a pulse. It can expand, a sponge, thick enough to make the few inches between two people feel like a continent. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you the other day,” I admit. “This case isn’t about me.”

  “I think we both know that’s a lie,” Andrew says.

  He is right, on all counts. I am an alcoholic, representing a man who ran away from one. I am the child of an alcoholic, who didn’t get to escape.

  But I’m also a father who wonders what I’d do in the same situation. I’m a victim of my own mistakes, holding fast to a second chance.

  I glance around the tiny Spartan room where Andrew has come for protection. We do all kinds of things to safeguard ourselves: lie to the people we love; split hairs to justify our actions; take punishment instead of waiting for it to be given to us. Andrew may be the one who’s been charged, but we are both being tried.

  I hold his gaze. “Andrew,” I say soberly, “let’s start over.”

  Andrew

  In jail, a black inmate will call a white inmate peckerwood, cracker, honky, redneck. He’ll call a Mexican a spic.

  A white inmate will call a black inmate a nigger, a monkey, a spook, a toad. He’ll call a Mexican a beaner.

  A Mexican will call a black inmate miyate, which means big black bean; or yanta, tire; or terron, shark. He’ll call a white inmate a gringo.

  In jail, everyone comes with a label. It’s up to you to peel it off.

  * * *

  The maximum security pod is made up of fifteen cells—five white, five Hispanic, four black, and the one that holds Concise and me. Considering themselves at a disadvantage, the blacks begin a campaign to get me traded for someone with the right color skin. They stand at the entrance to the dayroom, waiting for an officer to come in on his habitual twenty-five-minute walk, to plead their case.

  I wander around the dayroom, not really fitting anywhere. The television is tuned to C-SPAN, one of the five channels we are allowed, and a reporter is discussing the good fortune of turkeys. “Presidentially pardoned turkeys have reason to give thanks today,” the woman says. “Animal welfare activists at PETA said on Monday that Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Virginia, has promised better treatment of Katie, the female pardoned by President Bush as part of last November’s holiday tradition. The second turkey pardoned died last week, after living in substandard conditions.”

  Elephant Mike, the Aryan Brotherhood probate in control in Sticks’s absence, turns up the volume. Enormous and muscular, with a shaved head and a spider tattooed onto the back of his scalp, he was one of the henchmen who came with Sticks to attack me in the bathroom. “Hey, what’s the address for PETA?” he says. “Maybe they can get us better conditions.”

  The reporter beams at the camera. “Katie will be given a heated coop, more straw for bedding, extra vegetables and fruit, and some chickens in her pen for mental stimulation.”

  Elephant Mike crosses his arms. “Look at that. For stimulation, they get chicks, and we get spics.”

  A Mexican stands up and walks past Elephant Mike, kicks his chair. “Gringo,” he mutters. “Chinga su madre.”

  As I walk past Elephant Mike, he grabs my shirt. “Sticks wanted me to give you a message.” I don’t bother asking how Sticks, a whole floor away from us and in lockdown twenty-three hours out of the day, might be able to get word to Elephant Mike. There are ways to communicate in jail, from talking through the ventilation ducts in the bathrooms to slipping a note to someone at an AA meeting who will carry it elsewhere. “In here, you stick with your own kind.”

  “I thought I made it pretty clear that you aren’t my kind,” I reply.

  “I’m telling you this for your own protection.”

  Without responding, I start to walk away. I take two steps, and then find myself flattened against the wall. “At any minute, a fight might break out, and when that happens, you don’t want to be beside a guy who may turn on you. All’s I’m saying is, you’re asking to get yourself in a wreck if you don’t get it right, Grandpa.”

  A voice comes over the intercom. “Mike, what are you doing?” the detention officer asks.

  “Dancing,” he says, letting go of me.

  The officer sighs. “Stick to the waltz.”

  Elephant Mike shoves me and walks off.

  I clench my fists so that no one will realize my hands are shaking. If this were any ordinary Thursday, I would have gotten to my office by eight-thirty. I would have called over to Wexton Farms—the assisted living community—to see if there was anything I needed to know about—recently hospitalized people, delays in the transit shuttle, dietary restrictions. I would have checked with the kitchen to see what was on the menu for the day and welcomed the day’s entertainment—a lecturer from Dartmouth or a watercolor artist, sharing his or her passion with the seniors. I would have procrastinated by looking up news stories on the Internet about you and Greta and your rescues; I would have dusted off the picture of Sophie sitting on the corner of my desk. I would spend the day with people who valued whatever time they had left, instead of people who bitterly counted it down.

  I head up the stairs to the cell. Concise is huddled on the floor around a cardboard box where he keeps his canteen possessions. At the sound of my footsteps he shoves what looks like a piece of bread underneath the bottom bunk. “I’m busy in here. Step.”

  It smells like oranges in the cell. “What do you know about Elephant Mike?”

  Concise glances at me. “He think he’s some tank boss but he’s just doin’ a mud check. You know, see if you stick up for yourself, or put grass under you.” He seems to remember that he is not supposed to be helping me, but rather doing his best to get me into another cell. “If the dawgs find you in here, you gonna be hemmed up.”

  I look down at my feet and pick up a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and begin to flatten it between my palms. “Don’t cap it tight,” I say.

  When he turns around, I shrug. “Moonshine. That’s what you’re making, isn’t it?” Bread, oranges, hard candy—it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the chemical reaction Concise is aiming for.

  “Do your own time, not mine,” Concise scowls, and he busies himself under the bunk again.

  Taking my towel with me, I head toward the bathroom. The shower stalls are empty at this time of day; Emeril is about to come on the Food Network and it is the one program that all races agree upon. I turn the corner and find Elephant Mike standing against the bathroom wall with his pants down around his knees, his eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

  I recognize the boy kneeling in front of him, too. He calls himself Clutch and is barely old enough to grow a beard. No doubt, like me, he received Sticks’s and Elephant Mike’s warning, and was offered their protection, for a price. The currency of which I’ve interrupted.

  A flush works its way up from my neck. “Sorry,” I manage, and I leave the bathroom as fast as possible.

  On the television, Emeril throws garlic into a sizzling pan. “Bam!” he yells. I sit in the back of the dayroom and pretend to watch the TV
, although I do not see a thing.

  * * *

  If you pay Sheriff Jack thirty dollars up front, you are allowed the privilege of using the canteen. Funds for these luxury items are deducted from your account. A dollar-fifty, for example, will buy you either a bottle of shampoo or a twenty-ounce soda. You can buy soap that is like lye and rubs your skin raw. You can buy antihistamine and poker cards and a Spanish-English dictionary. You can buy Moon Pies and Paydays and Pop-Tarts and trail mix. Tuna, toothbrushes, a thesaurus.

  Sometimes I read the canteen order form, and think about who purchases what. I want to know who asks for Vicks VapoRub, if it reminds him of his childhood. I wonder who would order an eraser, rather than learn from his mistakes. Or, even worse, a mirror.

  They sell artificial tears, too, but it’s hard to conceive of an inmate who doesn’t have enough of his own.

  * * *

  I share a toilet with a drug dealer. I have done business with a thrice-convicted rapist: three packages of cookies in return for a deck of cards. I have settled down to watch Thursday night TV beside a man who killed his wife and cut her into pieces with a Ginsu knife, stuffed the body parts into a truck tool box, and left it in the desert.

  Just last year, I gave Sophie the stranger talk: don’t take candy from someone unfamiliar; don’t ever get into anyone’s car except ours; don’t talk to people you do not know. Sophie, who was born in a small New Hampshire town where folks knew her by name when she walked down the street, couldn’t understand the warnings. “How do you know who’s a bad man?” she asked. “Can you tell just by looking?”

  What I should have told her at the time was: Yes, but you have to be watching at just the right moment. Because the same man who robs a general store at knifepoint might, at a traffic light, turn and smile. The guy who raped a thirteen-year-old girl might be singing hymns beside you at church. The father who kidnapped his daughter might be living right next door.

  Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn’t mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you’re standing on the other side.

  Off to the right, I hear someone taking a leak. It is underscored by the scrip-scrip sound of a weapon being honed on the cement floor—a toothbrush or a wheelchair spoke being sharpened into a shank. There’s weeping, too, coming from Clutch, in the cell beside ours. He has cried every night since he’s been here, into his pillow, pretending no one can hear. Even more amazing, the rest of us pretend that we don’t.

  “Concise,” I whisper quietly.

  “Yo,” he says.

  I realize that I don’t really have a question to ask him. I just wanted to see if he is still awake, like me.

  * * *

  You come to visit me almost every day. We sit one pane of glass apart from each other, reworking the clay of our relationship. You would think that the conversations at a jail visit are grave and furious, packed with the emotion that comes when you don’t see someone for twenty-three hours a day, but in fact what we talk about are the details. I soak up the descriptions of Sophie, making breakfast for herself by putting the entire box of oatmeal into the microwave. I picture the trailer where you are living, the inside as pink as a mouth. I listen to an account of Greta having her first run-in with a common snake. You hold up pictures that Sophie’s drawn, so I can see the stick-figure family and my crayoned place in it.

  For you, too, it is all about the specifics of a world you can barely remember being a part of. Sometimes I tell you incidents that stand out in your childhood; sometimes you have precise questions. One afternoon you ask me about your real birthday. “It’s June 5,” I say. “The silver lining is that you’re almost a whole year younger than you think.”

  “I can’t remember my birthdays,” you muse. “I thought all kids remembered their birthdays.”

  “You had parties. Pretty standard stuff: movies, bowling, goody bags.”

  “What about when I lived here?”

  “Well,” I hedge. “You were little. We didn’t make a big deal about it.”

  You frown, concentrating. “I can picture a cake. It’s on a tablecloth I don’t remember us having in New Hampshire.” You look up at me, triumphant with recollection. “It fell on the floor, and I cried because we didn’t get to eat it.”

  That is the version that I fed to you, when it happened. “We had some of your nursery school friends over for your birthday,” I say carefully. “Your mother had been drinking. She was singing and dancing and making a scene, and I told her to stop it. ‘It’s a party,’ she said. ‘That’s what people do at parties.’ I told her to go lie down, that I would take care of everything. She picked up the cake and threw it on the floor, and said that if she was leaving, then the party was over.”

  You look at me, stricken; and immediately I’m sorry I brought this up.

  “She didn’t know what she was doing back then,” I say. “She—”

  “How can you defend her?” you interrupt. “If Eric had ever . . . if he’d . . .” You fall silent, a puzzle coming together. Along with your chin and dimples, did I give you the tendency to fall for someone dysfunctional? Would this gene be passed along to Sophie, too?

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” you whisper.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

  I watch you sitting on the stool, bowed by the weight of what you’re starting to remember, crushed by the episodes you don’t. In this new place we’ve found, sometimes there aren’t words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies. I lift my palm to the glass, pretending that it would be that easy to touch you. You lift yours, too, spread your fingers—a starfish. I picture the thousands of streets we have crossed, hand-in-hand. Of the high-fives we’ve exchanged after high school track meets and breathless father-daughter three-legged races. Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

  A poem circulating around D-block:

  A boy was born with skin pure white,

  He loved to fuck and he loved to fight.

  He was raised in the right way,

  Stood up for his race day after day.

  When he grew up and became a man,

  He got sentenced to do life in the pen.

  During his sentencing he stood straight and tall,

  He told the judge, “I’ll do it all!”

  So when he went down to hit the yard

  Others tried him, and they tried him hard.

  He never once lost a fight to another race,

  When he walked by them, they gave him his space.

  The off-brands didn’t like this a bit,

  So they all got together and put out a hit.

  The following day five of them tried,

  When the fighting was over, all five had died.

  All the woods got together and decorated the yard

  With bodies of off-brands and more than one guard.

  The Warden tried to stop them, but peed down his leg,

  All the fellas laughed and made the punk beg.

  The Governor called in the National Guard,

  The assholes came in to shoot woods on the yard.

  They walked up to this man and saw how he was lying,

  It was apparent to all that he wasn’t done dying.

  The strangest thing was, he was full of bullet holes

  But not a drop of blood present from his head to his toes.

  He looked up then and started to laugh,

  He laughed at the soldiers and the prison staff.

  “Why can’t you see that I am a saint?

  White’s made by God, all others ain’t.

  The reason you don’t see any blood on my hide

  Is my heart pumps nothing but PURE WHITE PRIDE!”

  On the rec yar
d, we sort by color; two or three men per group. The blacks play basketball; the whites stand at the far wall; the Mexicans huddle diagonally across from them. The yard isn’t really a yard, more an enclosed paved square. The ceiling on top protects inmates from the fierce heat during the summer; the Swiss-cheese holes in the far wall let the fresh air and the sun stream in. Someone has hung an enormous flag from the ceiling of the jail; it blocks part of the light.

  There is one guard for thirty men; he can’t see everything. For this reason, the rec yard is one of the prime places for a deal to go down. Cigarettes are bought surreptitiously—both real stuff and makeshift: lettuce leaves or potato peels rolled up in pages of the Bible. The inmates who have a drug trade going make their pitches out here, too. Drugs are the only reason the colors have to interact; looking for speed is called “chasing the dragon.” As I am watching, a white called Chromedome makes a sale to a Mexican. He takes a Sharpie marker out of his pocket and removes the tip of it, so that the buyer can inspect the goods. I’m close enough to smell the pungent vinegar scent of the black tar heroin he’s got hidden inside.

  Clutch, the kid, straggles at the edges of the whites like an unraveling thread. He is pale and skinny, with crooked buck teeth and freckles. His eyes are locked on the basketball game. From time to time his feet move in an imaginary play.

  One of the blacks dives for a loose ball, but misses. It rolls against the wall by the DO’s foot, and passes by in front of me. Clutch bends down and palms the basketball, spins it on one finger. He dribbles twice, the ball rising up to meet his hand magnetically.

  “Fool, give us the ball,” says Blue Loc, one of the dominant blacks in the pod. Concise stands with his hands on his hips, sweating hard.

  Clutch glances around, but he doesn’t relinquish the ball. When Elephant Mike walks to the perimeter of the game, Blue Loc says, “Tell your sister he betta act right foe he git smacked right.”

  Mike stands toe-to-toe with Blue Loc. “Since when do you tell me what to do?”

  The detention officer approaches. “Break it up,” he says.