Small Great Things(59)

It is more humiliating than being in public in my nightgown, than having to urinate without privacy in the holding cell, than being spit at by Turk Bauer, than having a stranger speak for me in front of a judge.

She had asked me if I touched the baby, and I’d lied to her. Not because I thought, at this point, that I still had a job to save, but because I just couldn’t think through fast enough what the right answer would be, the one that might set me free. And because I didn’t trust this stranger sitting across from me, when I was nothing more to her than the other twenty clients she would see today.

I listen to this lawyer—Kennedy something, I have already forgotten her last name—volley back and forth with another lawyer. The prosecutor, who’s a woman of color, does not even make eye contact with me. I wonder if this is because she feels nothing but contempt for me, an alleged criminal…or because she knows if she wants to be taken seriously, she has to widen the canyon between us.

True to her word, Kennedy gets me bail. Just like that, I want to hug this woman, thank her. “What happens now?” I ask, as the people in the courtroom hear the decision, and become a living, breathing thing.

“You’re getting out,” she tells me.

“Thank God. How long will it take?”

I am expecting minutes. An hour, at the most. There must be paperwork, which I can then lock away to prove that this was all a misunderstanding.

“A couple of days,” Kennedy says. Then a beefy guard has my arm and firmly pushes me back to the rabbit warren of holding cells in the basement of this godforsaken building.

I wait in the same cell I was taken to during the recess in court. I count all the cinder blocks in the wall: 360. I count them again. I think about that spider of a tattoo on Turk Bauer’s head, and how I hadn’t believed he could possibly be worse than he already was, but I was wrong. I don’t know how much time passes before Kennedy comes. “What is going on?” I explode. “I can’t stay here for days!”

She talks about mortgage deeds and percentages, numbers that swim in my head. “I know you’re worried about your son. I’m sure your sister will keep an eye on him.”

A sob swells like a song in my throat. I think about my sister’s home, where her boys talk back to their dad when he tells them to take out the trash. Where dinner is not a conversation but take-out Chinese with the television blaring. I think about Edison texting me at work, things like Reading Lolita 4 AP Eng. Nabokov = srsly messed up dude.

“So I stay here?” I ask.

“You’ll be taken to the prison.”

“Prison?” A chill runs down my spine. “But I thought I got bail?”

“You did. But the wheels of justice move exceedingly slow, and you have to stay until the bail is processed.”

Suddenly a guard I haven’t seen before appears at the door of the cell. “Coffee klatch is over, ladies,” he says.

Kennedy looks at me, her words fast and fierce like bullets. “Don’t talk about your charges. People are going to try to work a deal by prying information out of you. Don’t trust anyone.”

Including you? I wonder.

The guard opens the door of the cell and tells me to hold out my arms. There are those shackles and chains again. “Is that really necessary?” Kennedy asks.

“I don’t make the rules,” the guard says.

I am led down another hallway to a loading dock, where a van is waiting. Inside is another woman in chains. She’s wearing a tight dress and glitter eyeliner and has a weave that reaches halfway down her back. “You like what you see?” she asks, and I immediately avert my eyes.

The sheriff climbs into the front seat of the van and starts the engine.

“Officer,” the woman calls. “I’m a girl who loves her jewelry, but these bracelets are cramping my style.”

When he doesn’t respond, she rolls her eyes. “I’m Liza,” she says. “Liza Lott.”

I can’t help it; I laugh. “That’s really your name?”

“It better be, since I picked it. I like it so much better than…Bruce.” She purses her lips, staring at me, waiting for my reaction. My eyes move from her large manicured hands to her stunning face. If she’s expecting me to be shocked, she has another thing coming. I’m a nurse. I have literally seen it all, including a trans man who became pregnant when his wife was infertile, and a woman with two vaginas.

I meet her gaze, refusing to be intimidated. “I’m Ruth.”

“You get your Subway sandwich, Ruth?”

“What?”

“The food, sugar. It’s so much better at court than in jail, am I right?”

I shake my head. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Me, I should have a punch card. You know, the kind where you get a free coffee or a tiny tube of mascara at your tenth visit.” She grins. “What are you in for?”

“I wish I knew,” I say, before I can remember not to.

“What the f*ck, girl? You were in the courtroom, you were arraigned,” Liza replies. “You didn’t hear what you were charged with?”

I turn away, focusing on the scenery out the window. “My lawyer told me I shouldn’t talk to anyone about that.”

“Well.” She sniffs. “Pardon me, Your Majesty.”