Shimmy Bang Sparkle(87)
Resting my face in my palm, I set my takeout container on the kitchen floor. Everything inside my body ached. Every corner of my heart felt like it had been gnawed on. Another tear tumbled down my cheek, and I lined up the words please don’t go on the linoleum. He’d given up his freedom, his life, his future . . . for me. Just me. Only me. He had gambled on us and lost. And sitting there on the kitchen floor, with 589 carats in my purse, I felt so very, very unworthy. “He told me to go bite the stars for him and never look back.”
For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Until Roxie let out a clear, long, descending whistle, and Ruth said, “Oh my God.”
43
NICK
Halloween came and went, and I didn’t hear from her. I’d told her to run, to forget about us, and she’d listened. But fuck me if I wished she hadn’t. Because I missed her. I missed everything about her. Her smile, her smell, the way her hand had felt in mine. Her laugh, her love. That Stella blend of sinner and sweetheart. I missed just being near her sparkle. I missed being so full of love and hope. I missed being with Stella even more than I missed being free.
The one sign I had that she was still thinking about me was my attorney, who contacted me the day I was booked in, saying my sister had hired her. I’d almost said, “What sister?” But then I put it together and kept my trap shut about that too. The attorney was good at what she did; no bullshit, no small talk. The story was this. If I was willing to give up the diamond or the name of my accomplice, the sheikh would drop the charges. But in the handful of meetings we’d had it was clear to both of us that unless I was willing to throw Stella under the bus, I was class-A-felony fucked.
As the cops built a case against me, they put the screws to me to give up my accomplice. Witnesses had seen her. The sheikh’s bodyguard gave a description to a sketch artist. The sheikh had said he’d seen her, that he remembered her dress. The sketches weren’t of Stella, but of a little blonde bombshell who didn’t exist. No matter how hard they pushed, I didn’t give in. I didn’t say I knew her, or that I didn’t know her. They asked me where the North Star was. I told them the truth—I didn’t know. They were rough on me, but pressure makes diamonds, and every question those fuckers asked me about her just made me love her—and need to protect her—more and more.
November ticked by, and the guys on my cellblock got hand-shaped turkeys made of construction paper from their kids. Thanksgiving dinner was slices of dry turkey breast, potatoes out of a box, and a can-shaped slice of jellied cranberries, still with the ridges on the sides. The days slid by, one merging into the next, and the turkey decorations were replaced with Christmas trees studded with glue-soaked cotton balls.
Every time I made the walk down the cellblock, I felt sick with nostalgia for something I never had and never would have. Every wall reminded me of holidays and traditions I’d never get to experience with Stella, dreams so powerful because they were so new. Then, in January, the goddamned Valentine’s cards started to arrive. Every paper heart made my own bleed and made me ache to be on the road with her in that RV in a way I’d never ached for anything before.
The attorney had worked to make sure that while I was in the endless holding pattern between arrest and trial, I stayed where I was, with all the white-collar guys serving sentences on evasion and laundering. My cellmate was a decent enough guy. Some hacker who’d gotten himself in a shitload of trouble doing something that I didn’t totally understand. We got along fine, because he didn’t say much and neither did I. But sometimes, at night, he’d hum Tom Petty, and my eyes would get fucking blurry all over again.
I had the bottom bunk, and that afternoon—like every afternoon—I was looking up at the steel crossbars above me, at a scratched-in line of graffiti that said LIFE SUCKS AND THEN YOU END UP IN THIS SHITHOLE.
My thoughts drifted back to that magical night with her, on the roof of the RV, looking up at the stars. I relived the way she’d run her fingertips over my tattoos and the way I’d shown her this constellation and that one, not really caring if she saw them in the sky at all, but just enjoying the way it felt to be there with her. To experience her surprise and her happiness. With each day that passed since I’d seen her last, I’d added a few more stars to the underside of the bunk, so now it was dotted all over with the night sky, dots of ballpoint pen on plywood.
“Norton!” boomed the guard, yanking me out of the stars and slamming me back into the grim realities of the Orange County Jail.
I rolled over in my bunk and turned to face the door. He was a skinny guy who looked a lot like Willie Nelson, except for the uniform. “Got a visitor,” he said, and swiped his key card over the wall, making the lock on the cell shudder open with a clatter.
On the wall of the cell across from me was taped a doily heart that had MISS YOU! written across it in crayon.
“Who is it?”
“The fuck kinda question is that?” the guard said. “Think I know? I just work here, Norton.”
True enough. I rolled off my bunk and followed him down the hall. On either side, guys read or played cards or did push-ups on the bare concrete floor. We passed through one guarded doorway, then another, until we got to the visiting room. Because it was medium security, the visitors’ room wasn’t some Hollywood-style set of booths with bulletproof glass, but a big, open cafeteria space with picnic tables bolted to the floor, metal ones dipped in blue rubberized plastic. It even had big, triple-thick windows along one wall, one of the few places in the whole building that had a view of the horizon. Seeing the great wide open soothed the ache inside, but not very much.