The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  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