Criminal (10 page)

“I got an idea,” he said, smiling that wild smile.

Before long we were in the far-right lane, blinker clicking. The tight, quiet sound of Bird's car was a cocoon around us. We exited into a rest stop, and his hand pressed harder. I felt my eyelids flutter briefly shut.

He found a parking space, back by picnic tables too far away for any families to want to use. We were in the shade, under a big tree, far away from all the other cars. At the other side of the lot, there were fat ladies in zip-up suits climbing out of vans to walk their tiny dogs and men hitching up their belts on their way to the bathrooms, but nobody could see us.

Dee murmured in my ear, his tongue flicking. “We did it,” he said, leaning in to my neck and pressing his hand between my thighs. “You didn't fuck up.”

I put my arms around his neck, pressed him closer to me. He was electric, and I wanted to feel his buzz all the way to my bones. His hands started roving, mouth on me all at once, and I didn't want to wait. I climbed over into the backseat, lay myself down, already undoing my jeans. I thought he was a god over me, full of power. And I knew I was the only place he had to put all his energy. I knew, so clearly, that I was the only one who could take it all in, who could open up and give him what he needed.

I didn't say it like that, though.

“We drove straight back to Bird's,” was all I told them. “And you know the rest from my statement before.”

While they finished writing, I could feel their judgment on me, their quick-glancing eyes saying,
Why didn't you call the police right away? Why did you wait so long to say something?
But in remembering, and in telling them what they needed to know,
that golden feeling I'd had with Dee came back over me—the feeling of being a kind of temple for him. I was someone who worshipped him and understood him, in all the ways he needed and deserved. I could feel them hating me, thinking I was wrong, but they'd never had Dee's hands on them, never felt him as completely as I had.

They could judge me all they wanted. But they would never understand.

AFTER THAT, EVERYTHING MOVED VERY FAST. I TOLD THEM
what they needed, they wrote it down, and then suddenly the young policeman was standing up and saying, “Nicola Rachelle Dougherty, you are under arrest for being party to the murder of Deputy Duane Palmer. You have the right to remain silent. . . .”

I was stunned. For one, it was strange to hear that cops really did that part. The whole thing, just like on TV. About can and will be held against you. Given a lawyer if you can't afford one. But more shocking than that was that they were arresting me at all. I didn't know they could, didn't think they might. It hadn't been in my head at all when I went to the station this morning. All I wanted was to get them away from Bird. But now they were putting handcuffs on me. It was really happening, and I couldn't
believe any of it, real as all the details around me felt. There was a hand gripping me above my elbow, guiding me down a hall. A cold hard office chair. Waiting for hours for someone to process my papers. Cinder block everywhere. Picture taken. Fingerprints. STD test. Thick strong bodies moving around me. Another long hallway. Facing too many people—mean and bored—inside the drunk tank, and more waiting. A door clanging shut. Just like TV. And just like TV, it was like watching it happen to someone else.

Except it really was me.

HOURS. MORE HOURS AND HOURS OF WAITING. IT WAS
impossible to tell how long it was, because every minute took forever. I stared at the floor mostly, trying not to see the things behind my eyes, but not wanting to look around either. At people sitting there or leaning against the wall. Some of them talking about what they were in for. Some of them saying this was bullshit. Some of them not the kind of people you'd expect to see in a place like this at all. Some exactly what you'd imagine. Every now and then, one of them getting called out because someone had posted their bail.

All I could think, even though I knew it was foolish, was that I hoped I'd get to make my phone call before they got to Dee. I hoped he really had gotten out of town. I imagined the sound
of his voice when he answered, what I might say. What words of strength he might give to me:
I'll wait for you, you'll wait for me. It'll be okay.
It wasn't like I wanted to warn him. Only to tell him that I was sorry and that though I hadn't told them much, I hadn't had any choice about what I did say. When they finally came to get me, I pressed the numbers slow, my throat clenched around tears. But his phone went straight to voice mail.

“Dee.” I tried not to shake, knowing this might be my last chance to explain. But it was hard to talk, thinking I would probably never hear from him again. And he might not even listen to the message. “I love you so much. I love you so much still, and I will always. I'm so sorry, but I had to. I didn't have a choice. But I love you, baby, and I miss you and I'm so sorry.”

There wasn't anything else to say. Especially not with an officer standing there, watching me.

“No lawyer, huh?” she said after I hung up.

I shook my head.

“Didn't think so.”

She led me down another hall to a lobby where three other people I'd been in the drunk tank with were sitting. Hands on knees, heads down. She told everyone to stand up, follow her, because it was time to ride over to the jail. Two other officers walked behind us as we moved in a line behind her. There was a gray door, beyond which I could hear an engine running. She
told us to line up against the wall and then took the first woman through. The rest of us waited, even the officers seeming a little bored and tired.

Standing there in that ugly hallway, tired and scared, it hit me that nobody knew where I was—not Bird, not Dee, not even Cherry. I was going to jail, and for the first time in my life, I was going to be totally, utterly alone.

STRIP SEARCHED.

Yes, I had to bend over and—

Then a shower. No door on the stall, two officers watching.

Another search. It would've been funny to say to Bird,
What did they think I'd hide in there, the cheap-ass soap?
but I wasn't sure anything would be funny again.

The jumpsuit they gave me was orange and scratchy. White T-shirt. A sports bra. Grandma underwear. Flip-flops with thin soles that were hard to keep on my feet while I walked. I didn't know where they took my other clothes.

Handcuffed. This time with a chain around my waist too. And cuffs around my ankles.

Shuffling, following.

The key in the lock. Two beds—the shadow of someone else in the lower one. I realized it was late, though I didn't know what time it was. Guards telling the woman in the bed—I didn't try to see her face—that she had company. Me, climbing up, curling in the middle of the top bunk. The cell door slamming. The woman saying sleepily that her name was Priscilla, and wake up was six a.m. I guess I told her my name too. But mostly I was too scared to move. Or even cry.

IT WASN'T SLEEP, EXACTLY. MORE A NUMBING CLOUD OF
shock, enfolded in memories and half dreams and awake thoughts all shifting places with each other until the lights were on and the guards were calling everyone to wake up. I blinked at the ceiling, listening, expecting them to be mean and yelling. Surprised that they weren't. There were just loud calls of, “Good morning, ladies,” and, “Time to wake up,” and noises of groaning, coming-to-life people. Prisoners. And I was one of them.

“Six a.m., every morning including Sunday,” Priscilla said from the bunk underneath me. “Clean up the bunk, then breakfast,” she went on. “Better get moving.”

I sat up and looked over the edge of my narrow bed. All I could see below me were her knees in orange pants like mine,
and her wrists and hands dangling over those. In the curve between her thumb and index finger on her right hand, she had a tattoo—cursive writing of some kind—though I couldn't read it from up here.

“You showing her the ropes, LaSalle?” a heavyset blond guy in scrubs said outside our bars. He was leaning over one of those carts you see maids with in hotels.

“I got it, Archie,” she told him.

“Better get moving, then. Breakfast's in twenty.”

He slid open the cell door, and Priscilla stood up to take the rags and small bucket of ammonia-smelling water he was handing to her. She moved like you would imagine a boxer would move, and she had the same Mexican bronze skin as Dee. His skin I would maybe never touch again, never feel against my—

My stomach cramped. Priscilla was waving to the guy with the cart and turning back into the cell, her features calm. How could anyone be normal in here? Act like things were fine? Her long jet-black hair was thick and wavy, matted some in the back but basically the kind of hair you didn't have to do a thing to—hardly even wash—for it to be beautiful. It was surprising someone so pretty could ever be in jail.

“Come on, Dougherty,” the guy outside—Archie—called to me before he moved on. “I know it's your first day, but you might as well get used to it.”

I was amazed he knew my name, let alone that this was my first morning. When he'd wheeled down to the next cell, Priscilla started talking again.

“Archie's okay,” she said. “Little too friendly for my taste, chatty I mean, but his wife's been in the hospital and I think he's just lonely and scared.”

I nodded, not sure what to say, and stepped down to the first rung of the two-rung ladder between my bunk and hers. I followed what Priscilla was doing and pulled the bottom sheet of my bunk straight, stretched the blanket over that as best I could. I pounded the pillow twice with my fist, knowing that no amount of pounding was going to ever make that pillow fluffy. Not fluffy enough to make me forget Dee's head wasn't on another one, next to mine. I thought of my bed at Cherry's house, with five pillows and a down blanket as thick as my bicep. A bed I had thought before was cold and unkind.

Priscilla reached over my head. “Doesn't make sense to have a sloppy place,” she said, pulling things military straight in just a few seconds. “Not a lot of space here. Need to keep it nice. Here—” She handed me the small plastic bucket and a clean but worn-thin rag. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just give things a general wipe down—walls, the floor. Toilet, of course.”

I looked over at the shiny metal pot in the corner opposite our beds. There was a narrow table that served as a desk, with a
row of books along the back, and this provided a small amount of shield between the toilet and the open bars of our cell, but I still couldn't picture myself using it, even with my morning urge to pee coming on. I just couldn't do it—not with someone else so close in here. I went ahead and wiped it down before she could even ask me, though. Gary had told me a long time ago that the best way to make it inside was to be accommodating, but not scared. Confident, but not cocky. At the time I'd thought,
Some kind of life lessons to give your stepdaughter
, but now I was scrambling to remember anything else he told me.

We got the cell in good enough shape, I guess, before it was time for breakfast, though I still hadn't finished with my half of the floor when Archie came back with his cart, collecting our rags and buckets.

“The grits are just as nasty as they look,” Priscilla murmured behind me as we moved down the hall in line behind the others. “And at lunch, make sure to get pickles if they have them. May be the only vegetable you see for a while.”

The cafeteria was like a cafeteria at school, for the most part: a line where you got your food spooned onto a divided plastic tray and then lines of picnic-style tables, with benches bolted to the floor instead of chairs. Every eight feet or so a guard stood, watching everyone. But just like a school cafeteria, the place was full of chatter. Our block, Priscilla told me, was all girls between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and it definitely sounded like it. Black girls and Asian girls and Latino girls and white girls, fat girls and skinny girls, girls with tattoos and scars, girls with skin smooth as a makeup ad. All of them—or enough of them, at least—talking together. Gossiping about boyfriends and family, what was on TV yesterday, who'd been visited by who. I don't know what I'd expected—fighting and meanness, like in the movies. I didn't know whether to be glad and relieved by how regular things seemed or to feel even more horrified. Was I going to get so used to being in jail that it became a social hour for me too? So much so that I'd forget dinners at Bird's, with Jamelee? That I would forget Dee?

Dee. I pictured him as I tried to cut the cardboard-tasting hash browns with the edge of my plastic spoon—the only utensil they gave us. Where was he now? Had he really made it out of the state? Or had they found him anyway because of what I'd said? I didn't want to be here—didn't want any of this to have happened—and I certainly didn't want to be in jail while Dee ran around free. At the same time I knew, if they caught him, it would be much worse for him. And I didn't want that either. I really didn't.

An unexpected wave of anger took over me then. Toward Bird. For making me leave her house and for making me tell. For never, never once giving Dee a chance. At first it felt strange
to blame Bird, but the more I thought about her, the righter it became. She was always so convinced she was the only one who knew anything. She never even tried to understand. When she got high and mighty, there wasn't even a shred of kindness or mercy in her. It was her way and her way only, and it made a person feel more than small. Worthless underneath her judgment. Her bossiness. Her needing to do things so holy. If Bird had just left things alone, trusted me even a little, none of this would have happened. It would've blown over, like Dee said. It didn't have to be any of her business. But she had to be the boss of everything, had to make everyone hold to her strict standards. She could never accept anyone for just what they were. She could never really just let me be me. With her, I always had to be more than that. I couldn't just exist, the way I did with Dee. Instead I always had to be the me
she
wanted. The one who fit her requirements. And she'd push me toward it over and over, no matter how clear it was to both of us that I was always going to be too weak and too stupid to come anywhere close to being like her.