Now I looked at her, but it was like seeing someone through the wrong end of a telescope. She wasn’t talking anymore. She seemed to be waiting for me to try and speak, or write something, but her face was too far away to read, just an oval of flesh that was now asking me to write her everything, to write what the colonel did to me and when, to write how involved I’d been in holding this family against their will. “Write me everything, Kathy. Write me the truth.”
The word was a black bat flittering between us. I looked down at my own hands, at the cleaning calluses on my palms. I saw again Mrs. Behrani standing in her kitchen, pressing her hand to the side of her head. I thought of the pain she must’ve been in, and I hoped it wasn’t the last thing she’d felt. Connie Walsh’s voice was more relaxed now and she was getting up, telling me she was late for an appointment but would be back tomorrow to read the facts. That’s how she referred to what I would write. She touched my hand a second, then was gone.
I drank a spoonful of broth. It seemed to bathe my throat on the way down, but I didn’t drink any more. I imagined the Behranis laid out on a morticians’s table: the colonel, his suffering wife, his loyal son. My stomach drew backwards inside me and I sat up fast, my mouth filling with saliva. Connie Walsh’s notepad and pen fell to the floor and I left them there, moved to the chair by the window and sat. I breathed long and deep through my nose and mouth till I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up. Outside the window the parking lot was dimly lit with only a few streetlamps, and at the far corner cars passed on the road, their headlights and red taillights visible. In the hallway outside my door was the soft squeak of nurses’ shoe soles as they passed by, the metal wheel roll of a food cart or gurney, the talking and laughing of three women at the nurse’s station, a woman’s voice over an intercom calling a doctor to ICU, then more talking, an elevator door sliding open and closed, the flushing of a toilet in a room not far from mine, then someone humming, the flap of a wet mop hitting the floor, the humming a man’s voice, the tune unrecognizable; and I was unrecognizable. I could see my reflection in the window, a small shadowed face, hair flattened in the back. I looked like a sick child. But I felt dirty. My throat was dry and it was harder to swallow than ever, but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the facts for Connie Walsh but I kept thinking of Lester in Protective Custody, sitting alone in some cell separated from the rest of the prisoners because he’s a cop, the kind they would never understand, a man who would avoid shooting an armed Filipino boy, the kind that had risked his job to try and get me back into my house.
The mopping and humming had moved farther down the hallway, and I could hear the deputy on duty clear his throat, turn the pages of a magazine or newspaper. I got up and turned off the light switch near the door. The nurse’s button glowed white at the head of my bed, and I made my way back to the chair at the window, the vinyl upholstery sticking to the backs of my bare legs, and I remembered Mrs. Behrani bringing tea and kiwi fruit to her son’s room for me, her brown eyes full of compassion as she looked down at my bruised arms, as if her husband doing that had been the only reason I showed up at her doorstep drunk with Lester’s gun.
But it was everything: it was talking to my brother Frank and hearing that same old patronizing tone; it was the Mexican boy flicking his tongue out at me, his eyes on my crotch like it was something he’d already seen a hundred times before; it was wearing stolen clothes; it was the bright sun on the day after I had drunk too much with Lester the night before; it was my dry mouth, and the deep hungover fear I had that Lester had used me up already and was going back to his wife; it was driving through his neighborhood of one-story ranch houses in the heat looking for what I hoped I wouldn’t find—it was all of these things and none of them; it was Lester pulling out of me at the fish camp, coming onto me in what I was sure was a sudden change of heart; it was me letting Lester finish what we’d both started, letting all this happen so I could put off facing my mother and brother with the news that somehow Dad’s house had slipped through my fingers: I’d been willing for Lester to do anything so I could put off that moment of judgment.
I looked out over the empty parking lot, at the shadowed wooden fence and the black trees behind it, and for a while I tried to tell myself it was the colonel who had brought all this down on us. It was him not doing the right thing with my father’s house. It was his greed, and it was his pride. I remembered him on his new roof deck with his wife and daughter and friends, his expensive suit, a flute of champagne in his hand, potted flowers set in the corners of the railing and on the floor, laughing at something one of the fat rich women had said, the way he looked at me as we drove by, his eyes narrowed, all the muscles of his face still with some kind of concentration that scared me.
The door behind me opened and the light from the hall spread across the room. I didn’t turn around but in the window reflection I could see the deputy’s silhouette, his short haircut and baggy short sleeves, his gun belt. He seemed to look from the chair to the bed, then at the chair again before he stepped back into the hallway, the heavy door closing by itself. My throat felt like cracked stone and with each swallow my eyes would tear, but I didn’t let myself get up for water or broth.
I slept in my chair at the window. When I opened my eyes the darkness was fading and I watched the light come from the east, spreading over the stucco house and its yard, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Now the little boy’s mother drank her coffee and read her paper on the deck. She leaned forward as she read, her thick hair gathered over one shoulder. I wondered what her husband was like. Was he kind to her? Did he want a child when his wife got pregnant? Did they make love early in the morning before their son woke up? My throat hurt worse than ever. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, the toilet still flushing, a new doctor and the deputy were standing at the foot of the bed waiting for me. The doctor was tall. He introduced himself, then had me sit on the bed and he looked down my throat with his penlight, put his fingers on my lymph glands, and told me not to talk for ten to fourteen more days. The deputy’s eyes were full of a light that reminded me of my brother: fascinated by other people’s trouble, happy hewas in the clear. The doctor wrote something on the clipboard, then left, and the deputy handed me my old clothes: my shorts, the girl’s Fisherman’s Wharf T-shirt, her too-small yellow panties. He told me I was being transferred to Redwood City to be booked, then he left the room and I changed at the window, my eyes on the boy and his mother. The underpants were still tight at my hips and as I pulled on my shirt and shorts the boy stood, his hands open at his sides. He climbed out of the sandbox and walked over the grass. He stepped onto the deck in front of his mother, then held his hands out in front of him, his chin pulled in slightly, his belly sticking out. His mother smiled down at him. She wiped the sand off his hands and lifted him onto her lap, his small back against her breasts, his sneakers just barely reaching her knees. The door opened behind me but I didn’t turn around and I could smell the deputy’s spearmint gum as he said he was sorry but he had to follow procedure and he took my wrists and slipped the cool metal of his handcuffs onto them, clicking them closed, my pulse pushing against them. I couldn’t see the boy’s face anymore, and in the hours and days that followed I would think of him, the way an important dream comes back to you throughout the day, a day that begins at six-thirty, my door unlocking electronically, me stepping out onto the second tier and filing downstairs with black women and white women, Chicanas, all of us dressed in the orange khaki pants and tank tops and overshirts of the San Mateo County Jail, over fifty of us.