Love You More (Tessa Leoni, #1)(64)

Eleven a.m., everyone returned to their assigned cell for the second session of count time, followed by lunch. More rec time. Count time again at three. Dinner around five. Final count time at eleven, followed by lights out, which was not to be confused with quiet time. In prison, there was no such thing as quiet time, and in a corrections facility that housed both men and women, there was definitely no such thing as quiet time.

The females, I quickly learned, occupied the top three floors of the Suffolk County “tower.” Some enterprising woman (or man, I suppose) determined that the plumbing pipes from the upper floors connected to the lower floors. Meaning that a female detainee—say, my roommate Erica—could stick her head inside the white porcelain toilet bowl and proceed to “talk” to a random male on the lower floor. Though, talking isn’t really what any man wants to do. Think of it more as the prison version of sexting.

Erica would make lewd comments. Nine floors beneath us, a faceless man would groan. Erica would make more lewd comments: Harder, faster, come on, baby, I’m rubbing my tits for you, can you feel me rubbing my tits for you? (I made that up: Erica didn’t have tits. Meth had dissolved all the fat and tissue from her bones, including her breasts. Black teeth, black nails, no boobs. Erica should be starring in a public service announcement targeting teenage girls: This is your body on meth.)

Faceless man nine floors below us, however, wouldn’t know that. In his mind, Erica was probably some buxom blonde, or maybe the hot Latina chick he’d spotted once in Medical. He would whack off happily. Erica would start round two.

As would the woman in the cell beside us, and the cell beside her and the cell beside her. All. Night. Long.

Prison is a social place.

The Suffolk County Jail involves multiple buildings. Sadly, only males in the lower floors of the tower could communicate via the toilets with the females on the top three levels. Obviously, this posed a great hardship for the men in other buildings.

The enterprising males in Building 3, however, figured out that we could peer down at their windows from our cells. As Erica explained to me, first thing in the morning our job was to check for messages posted in the windows of Building 3—say, an artful arrangement of socks, underwear, and T-shirts forming a series of numbers or letters. Only so much could be spelled out with socks, obviously, so a code had been developed. We would write down the code, which would direct the women of 1-9-2 to various books during library time, where a more complete message could be recovered (f*ck me, f*ck me, do me, do me, oh you’re so pretty can you feel me get so hard …).

Prison poetry, Erica told me with a sigh. Spelling wasn’t her strong suit, she confessed, but she always did her best to write back, leaving behind a fresh note (yes, yes, YES!) in the same novel.

In other words, inmates could communicate between units, female pretrial detainees to males in general pop and vice versa. Most likely, then, the entire prison population knew of my presence, and an inexperienced detainee in one unit could gain assistance from a more hardened inmate from another.

I wondered how it would happen.

Say, when my entire unit was escorted down nine floors to the lower-level library. Or the couple of times we’d go to the gym. Or during visitation, which was also a group activity, one huge room filled with a dozen tables where everyone intermingled.

Easy enough for a fellow inmate to saddle up beside me, drive a shiv through my ribs, and disappear.

Accidents happen, right? Especially in prison.

I did my best to think it through. If it were me, a female detainee trying to get at a trained police officer, how would I do it? On second thought, maybe not overt violence. One, a cop should be able to fend off an attack. Two, the few times the unit was on the move—walking to the library or the gym or visitation—we were escorted by the SERT team, a bunch of hulking COs prepared to pounce at a moment’s notice.

No, if it were me, I’d go with poison.

Time-honored female weapon of choice. Not hard to smuggle in. Each detainee was allowed to spend fifty bucks a week at the canteen. Most seemed to blow their wad on Ramen noodles, tennis shoes, and toiletries. With outside help, no problem stashing a little rat poison in the seasoning packet of the Ramen noodles, the cap of the newly purchased hand lotion, etc., etc.

A moment’s distraction and Erica could stir it into my dinner. Or later, out in the commons area when another detainee, Sheera, offered me peanut butter on toast.

Arsenic could be combined into lotions, hair products, toothpaste. Every time I moisturized my skin, washed my hair, brushed my teeth …

Is this how you go crazy? Realizing all the ways you could die?

And if you did, how few people would care?

Eight twenty-three p.m. Sitting alone on a thin mattress in front of a thickly barred window. Sun long gone. Gazing out at the frigid darkness beyond the glass, while behind me, the relentless fluorescent lights burned too bright.

And wishing for just an instant that I could bend back those bars, open up the high window and, nine stories above the churning city of Boston, step out into the brisk March night and see if I could fly.

Let it all go. Fall into the darkness there.

I pressed my hand against the glass. Stared into the deep dark night. And wondered if somewhere Sophie was gazing out at the same darkness. If she could feel me trying to reach her. If she knew that I was still here and that I loved her and I was going to find her. She was my Sophie and I would save her, just as I had done when she’d locked herself in the trunk.