Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  His voice cracked then. He was weeping, I could tell. Blubbering outright. “Well, we are certainly even, Donna. Just like you wanted. In fact, we’re more than even now. You’ve won. You have broken me, and us, and the whole damn enterprise. I’m done. I surrender. I am fucking shattered. Are you happy? Are you fucking happy now?” I heard a whoosh of air. “Good luck making your goddamn bail.” With a click! the call ended.

  The young policeman who’d processed me had been hovering nearby, trying respectfully not to listen. “Ma’am?” he said as I hung up the phone. He reached for my elbow to guide me down the corridor, but I shook him off and grabbed the garbage can by his desk and bent over it, heaving.

  The jail was meat-locker cold. A few caged bulbs high overhead on the cinder blocks fluttered spastically like strobe lights. A stainless-steel cervix of a toilet was bolted to the wall in the corner; the concrete floors appeared soiled and stained. The air smelled of urine, of course, and whiskey and the scallion-y scent of body odor. But I was the only woman there reeking of vomit, and I supposed, in a perverse way, that was not entirely a bad thing. Because along with the bruise beneath my eye, it helped me blend in with the other women in my cell.

  Chapter 15

  Since I was the last one to be incarcerated that night, the pair of bunks had already been claimed. A morbidly obese woman lay snoring in a fetal position on the top one; her orange uniform had ridden up high above her waistband, exposing flesh like raw cookie dough. On the bottom bunk, a pair of desiccated young women huddled, trembling, as if they were on the deck of a ship pitching in a storm. One of them kept mumbling, ‘I told him Brandon had the ice, Brandon had the fucking ice, dude…’ She was scratching frantically; though her fingernails were bitten to the quick, they left little trails of blood across her forearms, which were covered with the same sores as her face. She fixed me in an annihilating stare: “What the fuck are you looking at, bitch? What the fuck are you looking at?” The woman beside her grinned malevolently from behind her tumbleweed of dirty blond hair, exposing a mouthful of broken teeth, a chin blotchy with scabs. She was tapping the frame of the bunk relentlessly. T-heet t-heet-t-heet.

  I bent over the steel cone of the toilet and vomited again.

  Joey.

  “Oh, fuck man, fuckman, fuckfuckfuck,” the first one shouted. “I can’t believe you just puked in here. The devil sent you. I know the devil sent you. You’re Satan’s bitch, Grandma.”

  I’d been handed a thin foam mat to sleep on—practically a nap rug like Austin and Ashley had in kindergarten. Shivering, I unfurled it in the farthest corner. I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them. My uniform reminded me of the hospital scrubs Brenda had lent me, except these were a scratchy, retina-frying orange and stank of insecticide.

  Oh, Joey.

  What have I done?

  Please, God.

  Don’t leave me here.

  A fourth woman was slumped against the wall adjacent to me. She was even paler than the rest of us and skinny, with a grim, hangdog face and hair dyed in an ombre effect, graduating from midnight blue at her scalp to washed-out teal at the ends. Her tattooed arms were crossed, her eyes closed. Her head kept lolling to one side, snapping her awake. She was where the whiskey smell was emanating from, I realized; she was like a human room deodorizer in reverse. As I settled in, she opened one eye and regarded me blearily.

  “Thank God,” she murmured in a heavy Southern drawl. “Last thing we need in this box is another whacked-out meth-head. What they got you for?” She nodded at my swollen cheek. “Barroom brawl? DUI?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even have the will to lie. “Pills.”

  “Yeah?” She suddenly perked up, unfolded herself from the wall. “Oxy?”

  I had the urge to slam my head against the cinder blocks until I cracked my own skull.

  To make things worse, my internal heat lamp chose this moment to blaze on. Excruciating pain was radiating from my lower back down along my sciatic nerve. Stiffly, I spread out on my filthy mat on the filthy concrete floor and tried to stretch before my entire leg seized up. I felt wretched and self-conscious and ridiculous: Who the hell does yoga in a jail cell? I flashed upon Ashley telling me how bourgeois and privileged I was.

  But then I thought: Fuck it. What did I care what the other inmates thought? I was just another addict. My name is Donna Koczynski, and I’m an alcoholic. I’d beaten my own husband with a fish spatula. I’d abandoned my family, stolen pills from my best friend’s house, and committed adultery. I’d made homemade pornography and ripped my husband’s fucking heart out and driven a stake through everything lovely we’d built together. The meth-head on the lower bunk was exactly right: I was Satan’s bitch. And now I was going to do fucking yoga in my fucking jail cell because it was the only thing I could think of to do in place of killing myself.

  Lunging forward in what little space I had, I did a downward dog. The lumbar relief was immense. Slowly, I maneuvered into an awkward cobra. I heard a thunk. The smelly, blue-haired woman was right down on the concrete beside me stretching gracefully.

  “Yeah, no way in hell I’m supposed to be doing this. But I’m still too drunk to feel it. Or care,” she announced to no one in particular.

  I glanced at her.

  “I used to be a big-time kundalini instructor down in Pensacola,” she volunteered. “’Til I herniated one of my disks. See? See the scar? Woo, boy. That’s when shit really got real. I’m telling you.”

  Rolling over, she scooted across the concrete, leaned against the wall to where I’d been sitting, and closed her eyes. “Yeah, okay. That’s enough for Kimmie now,” she said. Then passed out.

  Watching her chest heave up and down in its bright orange polyblend, I thought of Zack, and all he’d been trying to avoid. Then I thought again of Joey in our family room, his mouth dropping as the images of me began to slide before him and his friends on our television screen.

  All this love, all this betrayal. Everybody: We were all so utterly broken. I curled up in the corner and pressed my fists to my eyes.

  “Oh, lookie, lookie,” one of the girls on the lower bunk taunted. “Grandma over there’s crying.”

  I stood up and walked over. “Shut the fuck up. Or this perimenopausal bitch of Satan will beat you to a bloody pulp and break your fucking nose,” I said. “Just like I did to my husband.”

  And I must have sounded genuinely psychotic, too, because after that, even though I was shaking, the entire cell went quiet.

  “I’ve got to say, Mrs. Koczynski, we have some luck here,” the public defender announced the next morning as he lowered himself into the small plastic chair across from me in the holding room. Like everyone else, he’d mispronounced my last name. Coka-zeye-en-skee. Whatever. I was so happy to see him, I was dizzy. Isaiah Nickels was a young, light-skinned black man with an angular, solemn face and big ears and neatly shorn hair that adhered exactly to the curvature of his skull. He was wearing small wire-rimmed spectacles and a stiff, brand-new powder-blue suit jacket and a plaid tie that looked like they had been purchased off the rack somewhere and not yet taken in. On his wrist I noticed the glint of an antique rose-gold watch older and grander than anything else in the jail. I somehow imagined it was a family heirloom. I could picture it being given to him by his own father on the day he’d graduated from law school. It comforted me to see it, somehow.

  Isaiah Nickels leafed through my file quickly. “Because Columbus Day weekend is starting, Judge Bullard wants us to be out of here no later than 2 p.m.” His Southern voice was soft as peaches. “Your case is fairly straightforward. It says here that the majority of the pills in your possession were prescribed to your children. So, ma’am, as I see it, you were just being a responsible mother, picking up your family’s medications at Walmart. Now, all right. I do see that this Walmart was, in fact, in Ohio. But going for a long drive by yourself should not in any way be a crime, now, should it?” He gave me a long, embittered stare and I nodded. />
  “I just got distracted,” I agreed.

  Sighing, Isaiah Nickels looked down at the file. He had a habit, I noticed, of nodding to himself slightly as he thought. “Now, it says here that a few of the pills are, in fact, unaccounted for. But certainly, this amount is not enough to classify you as a drug trafficker. What we will have to do is contact your children’s doctor and have her send Judge Bullard a written confirmation that she did, in fact, prescribe them. Now, as for the Propecia?” Isaiah Nickels shifted slightly and swallowed and kept his eyes fixed on my file. “It says here you borrowed these pills from a ‘friend’ for, ‘lady problems’?”

  I nodded. “It was so, so stupid, I know.” I felt my eyes well up. “It’s just that I’m feeling, well, a little desperate these days.”

  Isaiah Nickels balanced his pen between his fingers like a tiny baton, flicking it back and forth. “Well, I do think we want to keep the word ‘desperate’ as far away from these proceedings as possible, ma’am. The words ‘desperate’ and ‘innocent’ tend not to marry so well together in a courtroom, do you understand?”

  I nodded again. From down the corridor I could hear a door slamming.

  “Now, the good news here is that the prescription for the Propecia itself was for only thirty pills, which is within the defined limits for ‘personal use.’ Also, trying out someone else’s male-pattern baldness drugs is not, in any jurisdiction, from what I understand, a felony.” He leaned in toward me. “Look, Judge Bullard, he’s conservative, but he can be fair-minded. One of his most frequent courtroom mottoes is, ‘If stupidity alone was a punishable offense, the whole damn world would be in prison.’”

  Isaiah Nickels took out his cell phone to google my kids’ pediatrician. “Plus, more than anything else, he hates when the Twenty-Third Task Force arrests people just before a long weekend.”

  The Dickson County Courthouse looked like an old redbrick schoolhouse with a prim little white belfry: a Grandma Moses painting come to life. Yet the proceedings moved with astonishing speed. Judge Bullard banged his gavel and moved through the cases as if he were an auctioneer. It made me nervous, but Isaiah Nickels touched me lightly on the elbow and gave me a reassuring nod. When I was ordered to rise, the judge barely glanced at me. Up to six years in prison, I could get. My mind reeled. I’d miss Austin’s graduation from high school and college, Ashley’s from Michigan—maybe even her wedding, if she married young, like I did—all the fruits of my labors as a parent snatched away from me forever by a single roadside incident.

  I was so anxious, my vision blurred. I was cognizant of neither the judge’s face nor the bailiff’s, nor of anyone else in the courtroom—were the arresting officers even there? Was there a stenographer like they always had on TV? All I could focus on was the deafening backbeat of my pulse and the giant sweat stains forming in the armpits of my orange prison shirt. My face was on fire, my skin glistening and releasing little droplets right onto the polished hardwood floor of the historic courtroom. I began fanning myself with my hand. I thought I was literally going to explode.

  Isaiah Nickels approached the bench and handed the judge a piece of paper. The judge scanned it and shook his head and murmured something and looked back down at my file and glanced at me and shook his head again. A hurried exchange followed. Straining, I thought I heard the judge say something that sounded like “overzealous” and “lady problems? Are you pulling my leg, Counselor?” and “My time, it doesn’t grow on trees, folks.” As he banged his gavel and barked his decision, he refused to even glance at me. I felt my knees buckle.

  But suddenly, Isaiah Nickels was shaking my hand vigorously. “Ah. I told you, ma’am.” He beamed. It was the first time all day I’d seen him smile.

  The bailiff was now beside me in her uniform, ushering me toward the front door of the courtroom.

  “Wait a minute. I’m free?” I heard myself saying. “I’m free to go?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Your case was dismissed.”

  “I don’t have to go back to jail or post bail or anything?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Will I have a record?”

  “No, ma’am. Mr. Nickels has already filed to have it expunged.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. Can I give you a hug?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Thank you anyway,” I said to her. “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate. I’m just so emotional.”

  “I can see that, ma’am,” the bailiff said stiffly. She started to retreat back toward the bench, then paused and pivoted around, her utility belt flopping around her hips. “Black cohosh, ma’am,” she murmured. “And plenty of yams.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To help with the hot flashes, ma’am. Don’t you be messing around with that Propecia.”

  My necklace, pantyhose, and keys were returned to me. My purple suitcase, handbag, and guitar materialized. Somehow, I was back to wearing my ridiculous leopard-print miniskirt and ANTHRAX hoodie. Yet the $840 dollars in my wallet was gone. More alarmingly, my Subaru had been impounded.

  It was only at that moment that I learned about something I’d been utterly ignorant of for the first forty-five years of my life: forfeiture laws.

  Under Tennessee’s legal code, it turned out, police could seize cash, personal property, and vehicles from people merely suspected of drug-related activity—without getting a criminal conviction first. This meant—I saw very quickly—that officers had financial incentives to arrest people—the unknowing, the disadvantaged, the out-of-staters, the minorities—any schmuck like me who happened to be driving along I-40 (considered—who knew?—a major drug-trafficking thoroughfare)—anyone who happened to be driving a little too quickly at two o’clock in the morning with, perhaps, a little more cash than usual or a broken taillight or their kids’ antianxiety meds or anything, really, that might possibly bring a few more dollars into the coffers of the police force.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice, “so the officers who arrested me last night can keep my car just because they suspected I was drug trafficking?”

  The clerk nodded. “’Fraid so, ma’am.”

  “But my case was just dismissed. All the charges against me were dropped. I did nothing wrong.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So you can get your car back. You’ll just have to file a petition for it.”

  “Okay. Can I do it right now, then?”

  “Well, you’ll have to get the forfeiture reversed by the state attorney general, ma’am. The case against you here was criminal. But the one for your car, that’s a civil proceeding. We can’t handle that here in Charlotte.”

  “Are you kidding me? But how long will that take?”

  “On average, I’d say about three months. You’ll probably want to get yourself a lawyer, ma’am.”

  “Hold on. You’re saying I need to hire a lawyer just to get my own car back? My car that was wrongfully confiscated in the first place?”

  “It wasn’t wrongfully confiscated under the law, ma’am.”

  “But there’s no case against me! They stop me for speeding, they happen to find my children’s legal prescriptions, and boom? They can take away my Subaru? Are you kidding me? How is that not literal highway robbery?” My voice was rising. The clerk was a middle-aged, churchy-looking woman with thick glasses and carefully crafted hair. Me, I was still in my ANTHRAX hoodie surrounded by local law enforcement and the full trappings of the Tennessee judicial system. I knew I had to rein myself in—and fast. But back in Michigan, I’d once had my car impounded for drunk driving, and getting it back then with a serious traffic violation hadn’t been this elaborate.

  “Please, ma’am,” I pleaded, affecting as genteel a tone as I could manage. “I don’t live anywhere near Tennessee. I was just driving through. And now my car has been seized, and you’re telling me there’s no way to get it back?”

  “I didn’t say that, ma’am. Like I’ve explained to you, you’ve simply got to file a peti
tion with the state.”

  “But that could take months?”

  “Well, yes, ma’am. Providing you expedite it.”

  I couldn’t help it. I glared at her. “Are you sure this isn’t just happening to me because I had out-of-state plates?”

  She gave me a pursed, unreadable look. “We’re all God’s children, ma’am,” she said curtly.

  “But. Well? Then how am I supposed to even leave town?”

  She shook her head. “I believe, ma’am, there might be a taxi service.”

  I frantically dug through my purse for my cell phone. It was nowhere to be found. Then it dawned on me with a sliver of horror: When the officers had ordered me to step out of my vehicle, my phone was sitting beside me in the Subaru in the cup holder. “I don’t suppose you could call it for me?”

  She looked at me. “I don’t suppose I could,” she said with asperity. “That would go against regulations. And be a misuse of county resources, ma’am.” She turned back to her paperwork. But after a moment, without looking up at me, she said, “Just to the left across the street, you’ll find a bank machine. And then, over there”—she pointed—“you should find a pay phone.”

  In the daylight, Charlotte revealed itself to be a single church spire, a garage, and two or three forlorn streets. I found its ATM easily enough, though the most it would dispatch was $80, as if the machine itself did not trust outsiders and wanted to punish us. I could only imagine the conversation that would ensue when I asked the court clerk if she could break a twenty so I could use the pay phone.

  Isaiah Nickels was just heading out as I was wrangling my suitcase and guitar back up the steps of the courthouse. “Uh-oh. They got your car, didn’t they?” In the pale late-morning sun, he appeared taller, yet wearier. “This whole damn thing is a racket.” He motioned to a forest-green Toyota Camry parked at the foot of the stairs. “If you don’t want to wait for a taxi, I can drop you off in Dickson. You can rent a car there to drive to Memphis.”