No One Knows Us Here(91)

It was hard to fall asleep at night. All those noises from the other inmates. The clanking, empty sounds of jail. After the lights went out, I would lie on my cot and close my eyes and try to visualize my happy place. It was a technique Wendy had told me about, something she learned in her last round of therapy. Just imagine yourself somewhere beautiful, Wendy said. Remember the color I painted her room? That was the color of the sea, and she pictured herself floating in it, in the middle of the Caribbean. Warm water, salty breeze, faint sounds of strumming guitar. White sandy beaches, palm trees. You have to immerse yourself in it. Picture it all. It relaxes you, Wendy said.

I tried to picture it, the turquoise-blue water, the screech of tropical birds, Calypso music, the white sand, the palm trees swaying in the breeze—everything. I pretended I was out in the water, just floating, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t float. My body plunged underwater, like someone was pushing me, pushing my chest down so I couldn’t breathe. I’d shot up in bed, gasping for air, like I was drowning, like I was dying.

The Caribbean was her place, Wendy said when I relayed this to her. I needed to come up with something else, a place of my own.

The next night I lay in bed and nothing appeared. Not at first. Then it came to me. That first day Alejandro showed me the apartment. It was October but it was sunny outside, and I’d thrown open the windows to let in a breeze. The wind rustled through the leaves on the trees below; the leaves were yellow and flickering in the sun, a golden carpet. I could hear the viola play, a clear, haunting sound, a little melody.

In my jail cell, I couldn’t hear the echoing sounds of guards’ feet or the other inmates’ coughs and grunts. I heard only the rustling of leaves, the viola’s lingering refrain, and my own voice, humming along. I felt my arms lifting over my head, my bare feet tapping on the shiny wooden floors. I called over to Alejandro. Look at me, I said, who am I? I was the girl from the music video, the girl from the New Order song. That’s where I wanted to be, the moment I wished I could relive again and again. Back in my own apartment, my hands raised above my head, dancing.





CHAPTER 32


My trial was the most awaited, most highly publicized, most politically charged murder case in Portland history. Buzzfeed put me in a list of our nation’s top ten accused murderesses, along with Andrea Yates and Aileen Wuornos. I was only number seven.

Wendy had tried to tell me and so had Jamila—this was huge. I was huge. Blowing up Twitter. Features in Willamette Week and the Oregonian. The cover of People magazine. Even after they showed me, even after I read the whole spread—my life, dissected and examined on the page, a timeline and map of the “unthinkable act” I committed in Leo’s “upscale urban hideaway”—I still couldn’t believe it. I read the entire story with fascination, as if the woman in the story were a stranger. I almost didn’t recognize the picture they used for the cover, my twelfth-grade yearbook photo. My cheeks still fat with youth, my eyes wide open. “Pretty Little Killer,” they called me.

In a guarded bathroom, I changed into a brown tweed suit with a soft silk blouse that tied at the neck in a floppy bow. In the tweed suit I felt different. It was structured, holding the pieces of me together in a way the prison uniform didn’t. I had brushed my hair into a severe ponytail and didn’t wear any makeup. I looked young this way, sort of forlorn and innocent, like a kid dressing up in her mother’s business suit. I wondered who had selected these clothes, how they had settled on my look for the trial. It was hard to imagine my lawyer doing it.

Jamila had promised to hire me the best criminal defense lawyer she could find. The best was Calvin Lewis. From the very first time I met him, in a windowless room at the jail, I’d been impressed by him. I was in my jail uniform—tube socks, rubber sandals, grungy sweats, and a faded-to-pink T-shirt with a stretched-out collar—and he strode in wearing a three-piece suit. He had the body of a marathon runner, tall and lean, and wore his wiry black hair buzzed close to his scalp, with a neatly manicured beard. He was serious, with large dark eyes that stayed trained on me the entire time we talked.

After meeting with him several times, I still didn’t know anything else about him, while he knew everything about me. Almost everything. I didn’t know how old he was, but I guessed midforties. If I squinted, I could see little white hairs poking out through his beard. He was handsome, in that severe, stern professor way of his, and he was married, judging by the ring on his left hand. That was all I knew about him.

In the courtroom, I stood beside Calvin Lewis, stunned. I had planned to bow my head before the judge, the audience. A nun heading to the altar to receive a benediction, eyes cast downward. Hands clasped together in prayer—no, that would be too much. Hands clasped at my chest.

In the hubbub, I forgot my nun impression entirely.

“Order!” the judge was saying, pounding his gavel.

Every seat in that courtroom was taken. Some people in the audience were holding signs, like they were marching through the streets or participating in a parade. They were demanding justice, one way or the other: LET HER FRY or SET HER FREE. Several of the signs had no words at all, just pink squares printed with an illustration of a raised fist gripping a knife. At the tip of the knife, fat cartoon drops rolling off it like tears.

“This is a courtroom, not a political rally,” Judge Landsberger cried out, ordering a deputy to gather up the signs. We weren’t happy about this judge. It would have been better to have a younger judge. A female judge. A not-so-white judge. Landsberger hadn’t tried another case like mine, though—murders of tech gurus being fairly uncommon, even in this day and age—so they held out hope he’d be fair. It was the jury we needed to convince, Calvin kept reminding me. I tried to believe that.