No One Knows Us Here(98)

Instead I tried to get to the truth of it. Do any of us understand the truth of our own lives, of the very best and worst that we’ve been through? Probably not. We all have our own filters, our own perceptions and misperceptions.

After they read this, they’ll lose faith in me. Some of them will. They’ll feel betrayed, perhaps. They’ll demand a retrial. They can’t try me again, though. I know that. And even if they wanted to, they’d have to find me first.

I walked around my new city, and I felt grateful for it, for the freedom. Lying in that cell all those nights, it was all I ever wanted: freedom. Mornings in language class, afternoons writing. In the evenings, Wendy was home and we cooked dinners together. I was trying to teach her to cook, and maybe it was helping her.

I kept a close eye on her, but I tried not to let her know I was doing it. I would weigh her daily if I could, record her progress in a chart. Examine her skin for signs of sprouting hair, sniff her breath. I would root out those telltale signs of regression, any little sign that she was just faking her way back to health. But you can’t love someone by watching them. I should know that better than anyone.

Did I deserve it, this new life, this freedom? Probably not. I tried to be grateful. I got away with murder. When I think about it, my mind uses those words exactly: I got away with murder. I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve it. Someday, after the hubbub died down and everyone was wrapped up in the next scandal, the next hashtag craze, I’d go home. I’d slip back into my old life, go to law school. I wanted to follow in Jamila’s footsteps. Pay it forward. So many others just like me—or nothing like me—went through what I went through, or worse. Not everyone got away with it. Jamila reminded me of this every single day, forwarding me articles. A girl, sixteen years old, sentenced to life in prison for shooting her captor, who had kidnapped and raped her for two years. Women held for years in ICE camps after getting smuggled over the border by sex traffickers. A girl who had killed her own father with an axe. No one knew why. I could guess.

I wanted to help them. I promised myself I would, someday. It would make a suitable ending to this story, wouldn’t it?

The book needed an ending before they would send me the second half of my advance. I needed the second half of the advance before I could go back home, go to law school, and swoop in to save all those women, deliver them from a system that was designed to keep them down. If I had my ending, I could do it. I could save them all.

I couldn’t write the ending of this book because I refused to end it this way, with me depressed and lonely in the drafty attic apartment. Sometimes when I was sitting in the attic, a blanket wrapped around me, my hands gripped around a mug of tea to keep my fingers warm enough for typing, I closed my eyes and pictured myself dancing by the open window of my old apartment. I tried to summon the sound of Sam’s viola. I knew I’d never hear it again except dimly, warped through my mind’s ear. My punishment. My life sentence.

I was tempted to simply invent something. How would anyone ever know? I tried endings out, drafting pages and pages of possible futures. None of them felt believable.

I tried to think of all the women wearing the pink T-shirts with the fists holding knives. Of all the women crawling out from the hashtags, telling their stories. I wanted to give them a happy ending, show them that it was possible. I could give them that.





CHAPTER 34


“We’re going out tonight,” Wendy announced. “Put on something nice.”

“I don’t have anything nice.” I didn’t look up from my manuscript. I’d been staring at it for days, weeks, reading and rereading. Editing for errant commas. I had written it all out longhand, in a notebook. Then I bought a computer and typed it all myself. That had taken a few weeks. My editor kept hounding me for pages. Just send the first chapter. Just send me what you’ve got. I told her it wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. She was acting panicked, like if the book didn’t get done, the world as we knew it would end. She would hire me a ghostwriter, she said. The world needed this story, and they needed it now, while it was still hot.

I had started to ignore her. Maybe I’d never finish it. Maybe I’d never get the second half of that advance and never go back to law school and never help any other women the way Jamila had helped me. Maybe I could live with that.

Wendy threw an outfit on my bed. A simple black dress, a pair of tights, a bright-red scarf. “Put this on,” she said. “The concert starts at eight.”

“Concert?” I turned to look at her, standing with her hands on her hips. She was already dressed up in her own teenage way, in a too-short skirt and a bulky cable-knit sweater. Her eyes were clear and bright, the lids sparkling with some sort of glitter eye shadow.

“Why did we even move here if we weren’t going to take advantage of all the culture. The art, the music?”

“I don’t know,” I grumbled. “It was your idea, remember?”

We took the subway to the city center, and then Wendy led me through the streets, weaving us through dark cobblestone sidewalks as if she had been there a million times, as if she knew exactly where we were going. We entered an old church. It was so dark inside I could barely see anything at first. It had no electric lights at all, just candles. It smelled strongly of must and melted wax. “What is this place?” I whispered.