Night Road(71)

The door clanged shut behind Lexi, but she could still hear the stomping and the catcalling going on in the cell block. She crossed her arms across her chest and stood there, shaking.

“I got the bottom bunk,” the girl said; her teeth were brown and ruined.

“Okay.”

“I’m Cassandra.”

Lexi saw now how young her cellmate was. The lines in her face and the circles under her eyes aged her, but Cassandra probably wasn’t much past twenty-three. “I’m Lexi.”

“This is receiving. We won’t be cellmates for long. You know that, right?”

Lexi didn’t know anything. She stood there a minute longer, then she climbed up onto her rickety bunk that smelled of other women’s sweat. Lying on the coarse gray blanket, staring at the dirty gray ceiling, she couldn’t help thinking of her mother, of that one terrible prison visit.

Here I am, Mom. Just like you after all.





Sixteen





Before the accident, Jude would have said she could handle anything, but grief had overwhelmed her. Intellectually, she knew it had to be dealt with somehow, and yet she couldn’t imagine how to accomplish such a thing. She was like a swimmer in deep water who saw a great white approaching. Her mind screamed swim, but her body just hung there, paralyzed.

To everyone else, the so-called trial had been the end of the story. Justice was served; now go back to your regularly scheduled program. Jude had felt pressure from everywhere to heal now.

Instead, she’d gone gray. It was the only way to describe her life. A depression unlike anything she’d ever known or imagined descended. She could find nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.

One by one, in the past six weeks, people had given up on her. She knew she’d disappointed her friends and family, but she couldn’t care about it. Her feelings were either gone or buried in such a dense fog that they eluded her. Oh, sometimes she was normal—she might go to the store or drop something off at the post office, but she was always at risk of finding herself standing somewhere, in front of a row of plump purple eggplants or holding a letter, with no memory of how she’d gotten there or what she needed. She’d gone to the store twice in her pajamas, and once she’d worn shoes that didn’t match. The simplest tasks loomed like Mount Everest. Making dinner was beyond her.

She cried at the drop of a hat and screamed out for her daughter in her sleep.

Miles had gone back to work, as if it were completely normal to live with a frozen heart. She knew how much he was still hurting, and she ached for him, but he was already growing impatient with her. Zach hardly came out of his room. He’d spent the summer in his new gaming chair, with his headphones on, killing animated enemies.

They were doing their best, Zach and Miles, and they didn’t understand why Jude couldn’t pretend, why she couldn’t go out for lunch with her friends or work in her garden. Something. She saw how Miles looked at her in the evenings, over a dinner he’d brought home in Styrofoam containers. He would say things like, “How are you today, honey?” What he really meant was, “When are you going to get over this and come back to me?”

He thought that was the endgame. For him, the memory of their daughter was already becoming a treasured family heirloom that you put on a high shelf, behind a case of glass, and took down once or twice a year, at birthdays or Christmas. You couldn’t handle it too roughly or too often for fear it would break.

It wasn’t like that for her. She saw blank spaces everywhere—in an unused chair at the dinner table, in teen magazines that came addressed to Mia Farraday, in clothes left in a hamper. Mostly, she saw Mia in Zach, and it was unbearable. On good days, she could smile at her son, but there were so few good days; and on black days, when she couldn’t get out of bed, she lay there thinking what a shitty mother she’d become.

By the middle of August, she’d stopped doing almost everything. She had to remind herself to shower and wash her hair. The only time she even got out of bed was to welcome her husband home, and she saw the sadness in Miles’s eyes when he looked at her then.

She knew she was depressed. Miles kept asking her to “see someone.” He didn’t understand how deep this new darkness in her ran and how afraid she was to let go of it. She didn’t want to get better. Really, she just wanted to be left alone. On the rare day when she even thought about trying, she told herself that Zach needed her, that Miles needed her, that she’d always thought of herself as a strong woman, but the words were like snapshots found in a drawer that showed a stranger’s life. Impossible to care about.

Now, she and Miles were out on the back patio, pretending to be the couple they’d been before.

Miles was in the lounge chair beside her, with his feet stretched out. In his lap lay an open newspaper, but she knew he wasn’t really reading it. They all tended to avoid the news these days; there was always a story about drunk driving somewhere within the pages. She felt him looking at her, but she didn’t meet his gaze.

Instead, she counted the minutes until she could make some excuse and go back to bed. She was holding Mia’s unset, unfinished ring in her hand. She did that a lot lately, just held it.

“You should put that away,” Miles said. There was a taint of irritation in his voice that had become familiar.

“And go on,” Jude said. “Yeah. I know.”