Night Road(70)

For the first time, she was really, truly afraid. All she’d thought about was her soul and atonement, but what about her body? How would it be to spend more than five years behind bars?

“Oh, Lexi,” Eva said, tearing up. “Why?”

“You took me in,” Lexi said. Even now, with all that was happening, that sentence meant so much. Lexi found it hard to say more. “I couldn’t let you waste your savings on me.”

“Waste?”

“I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

Eva started to cry in earnest. “Be strong,” she said. “I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ll write to you.”

“That’s enough,” the guard said, and Lexi felt herself being pulled away, led out of the courtroom and down a long hallway and up two sets of stairs. Finally, they put her in a room that was about ten by ten, with cement walls; no window; a metal, seatless toilet; and a metal bench. The place smelled of urine and sweat and dried vomit.

She didn’t want to sit down, so she stood there, waiting.

She didn’t wait long. Soon, the guards came back for her, talking to one another about something that had happened at lunch as they led her out of the back of the courthouse to a waiting police car.

“We’re taking you directly to Purdy,” one of the guards said.

Purdy. The Washington Corrections Center for Women.

Lexi nodded and said nothing.

The guard shackled her ankles and snapped her handcuffed wrists to the chain around her waist.

“Let’s go.”

She hobbled along behind him, her head hung low. In the police car, she was buckled into the backseat. The chains around her waist bit into her back, so that she had to sit forward, with her nose almost pressed against the grill that protected the officers in the front seat. As they drove to the corner, they came to a stoplight.

In front of them, the Farradays were crossing the street; they looked like paper-doll versions of themselves, thin and fragile and bent. Zach was in the back, alone, his shoulders slumped downward, his chin dropped. From this side, his shaved head and burned jaw turned him into someone she hardly recognized.

Then the light changed, and they drove away.

*

Purdy prison was a monolithic slab of gray concrete set behind a wall of razor-wire fencing. All around it were green trees and blue skies. The surrounding beauty only served to make the prison look darker and more menacing.

As she moved toward this life she’d never imagined, Lexi wished suddenly, fervently, that she had pled not guilty as her lawyer had suggested.

Inside the prison, they put her in a big cage. Crouched inside like an animal, she could see some of the prison. Bars of steel and walls of Plexiglas and women in khaki gathered in groups.

Lexi closed her eyes and tried to make it all go away.

Finally, a guard came to get her, unlocked the cage, and herded her forward. She stood numbly beside him as he pressed her fingers onto an inked pad and rolled her prints onto paper. They positioned her in front of a camera, snapped a picture. Then someone yelled next! and she was moving again, shuffling forward into the loud, pulsing, clanging heart of the prison.

The guard led her into a room. “She’s all yours.”

Two female guards came forward. “Strip,” one said, resting a plump hand on the walkie-talkie on her belt.

“H-here?”

“We can do it for you—”

“I’ll do it.” Lexi’s hands were shaking as she unhooked her belt and pulled it free from the loops.

The guard took the belt from her, coiling it in her hands as if it were a weapon.

Swallowing hard, Lexi unbuttoned her pants and stepped out of them. Then she kicked off her black flats and unbuttoned her white shirt. It took every scrap of bravery she possessed to reach behind her back to unhook her bra.

When she was naked, the heavier of the two guards came forward. “Open your mouth.”

Lexi followed one humiliating instruction after another. She opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, lifted her breasts, coughed, wiggled her fingers, turned around and bent over.

“Open your cheeks.”

She reached back and held her butt cheeks open.

“Okay, Inmate Baill,” the guard said.

Lexi straightened slowly and turned to the guard again. She couldn’t look the woman in the eyes, so she stared at the dirty floor.

The guard handed her a stack of clothes: a pair of scuffed white tennis shoes, khaki pants and shirt, a used white bra, and two pairs of discolored underwear.

Lexi dressed as quickly as possible. The bra didn’t fit right and the underwear itched and she needed socks, but of course she said nothing.

“Be careful who you hang around with, Baill,” the guard said in a voice that didn’t match her gruff exterior.

Lexi had no idea what to say to that.

“Let’s go,” the guard said, indicating the door.

Lexi followed the woman out of the reception area and into the prison again, where the noise and the pounding and the catcalls seemed deafening. She kept her eyes downcast and followed, feeling the floor literally shaking beneath her feet from the hundreds of women stomping on the cell block before her.

Finally, they came to her cell, an eight-by-ten block of space hemmed on three sides by concrete walls and on the fourth by a solid metal door that had a small window, probably so the guards could look inside. The cell had two bunks with thin mattresses, a toilet, a sink, and a small desk. On the lower bunk sat a scrawny white girl with a cross tattooed on her throat. At Lexi’s entrance, she looked up from her magazine.