On the bottom tier we sit at steel tables and eat toast and cold cereal or scrambled eggs and sausage links. Two color TVs are fixed to the wall, tuned to morning news shows, the anchorwomen pretty and successful. In the middle of the room is a control desk with four woman deputies on duty, and on clear days the door to the rec yard is open, though it’s not a yard at all but a flat rooftop with a Universal weight-lifting gym set in the middle of it, a piece of equipment no one uses. One morning a young black girl pulled herself to the top of the chinning bar, sat there, and smoked two cigarettes. At the edge of the yard is a high hurricane fence topped with razor wire, then it’s four stories down to the streets of Redwood City. You can see the old domed courthouse and part of the Hall of Justice building where Lester used to work. But of course Lester is here with me now, somewhere under us in another wing with the men, the carjackers and rapists and murderers.
On the bottom tier after breakfast, most of the women stay at the tables and smoke and talk. There are pay phones on the wall which never go unused, women calling their kids and boyfriends or husbands collect, their eyes miles away as they talk and sometimes yell or cry into the phone. Some even laugh. But I don’t. I don’t smoke either. My throat can’t tolerate it, the smoke going down like grit rubbed into a raw scrape.
There’s a black woman named Jolene who smokes pack after pack of Marlboro Lights. Her voice is as deep as a man’s. She’s short with boyish hips and small breasts, and her knuckles are wide and hard-looking and she never stops talking and even the big women seem smaller around her. My first week, one afternoon before the midday lockdown for lunch cleanup, she tapped me on the shoulder and said loud enough for an audience, “Why youhere, girl?”
I was sitting at a table with two Mexican girls who spent their lunch talking to each other in Spanish. Three or four black women were standing around and behind Jolene waiting for my answer. At first I didn’t understand her question and couldn’t talk anyway. I pointed to my throat and shook my head.
“You can’t talk?”
I nodded.
“You deaf?”
I shook my head again. One of the women behind Jolene smiled and I could see her teeth were bad.
“So you’s mute.”
The one with the bad teeth laughed. A few others smiled. One of the deputies from the control panel called over to everybody to head back to their cells for lockdown. I nodded at Jolene and she was smiling like I’d just shown her something she’d been wanting to know a long time.
“You mean God sit back with the remote and motherfuckin’ muteyour ass?”
Jolene’s girls laughed and I smiled and that afternoon after supper, while we all sat at tables in front of the two TVs on two different channels, waiting for our turn to go to the commisary or laundry exchange, Jolene yelled across the room at me: “Hey, Remote! Mute them motherfuckin’ TVs!”
She laughed louder than the women around her, and from then on if a woman needed me to pass her the salt or hand off to somebody a lighter or cigarette, she’d say in a loud voice, “Send me the salt, Remote.” Or, “Remote, pass this down to Big April.”
After the first two weeks, when I was alone in my cell I tried talking again, naming the objects in front of me, “Floor. Wall. Toilet. Sink,” my throat aching no more than when you have an allergy, my voice maybe lower than it used to be, but I still kept quiet on the bottom tier and in the rec yard and I let them call me by my new name.
These first weeks Connie has come and seen me three times, once with two detectives who took me to a room and had me write how the colonel tried to strangle me before he went on to do the rest. Lawyers and visitors have to go to the mezzanine on the second tier, a room of enclosed booths with thick glass separating us from visitors. Until I could use my voice again, Connie would talk into the phone while I wrote my answers and questions and held them up to the glass. Now that my voice is back I hunch forward and talk softly into the receiver so none of the other inmates with visitors will notice.
Every time, Connie wants to hear the facts. I tell her what I’ve done, wishing I hadn’t said anything because her planned defense of me is that I was defenseless, suicidal, and drugged when Lester was locking the Behranis into their bathroom, that I was sick and physically weak, my judgment impaired, the next day when he forced the colonel and his son to Redwood City. She wants to argue that I am not who they’re charging me as being, though she admits she has a mountain to climb to prove all this because my best witnesses are no longer with us. That’s her expression, “no longer with us,” though that doesn’t seem true to me.
Connie was able to get me some money for magazines at the commisary, but during the lockdown hours after our meals, I sit on my bunk and can’t even look at them. Instead, I keep seeing Mrs. Behrani, her small lined face, her deep brown eyes, the way she looked at me, one woman to another, when she asked if Lester would hurt her son, who I feel hovering in the corners of my cell, a young and polite presence. And I see his father in a way I never saw him, his bald head turned towards me, his face with no expression, like nothing I did to him can touch him now, but his eyes are two dark stars of grief.
Sometimes I sit against the wall on the rec roof with the sun on my face. I can hear the TVs inside, the chatter of the other women, one of them coughing. I look past the chain-link fence at the edge of the roof, the razor wire too bright, and I ache to see Lester, to lie beside him in the hot loft of the fish camp, to kiss his crooked mustache and hold his narrow back. I remember his ex-partner at the hospital saying he’ll be thrown to the hounds, and I can only hope he’s wrong, that the guards will look out for one of their own, though I feel like I’m lying to myself thinking this. I don’t let myself think of his kids, or his wife, and if I think of the house at all it’s only that Ishould’ve died there and nobody else, of how much better it would’ve been if Mr. Behrani never saved me from Lester’s gun, if Mrs. Behrani never saved me from her own pills.
Today Jolene walks over to me, a cigarette smoking between her lips, her eyes squinting like a man’s. “Mezzanine bitch sent me to get you. You got visitors.”
I’m so surprised to hear this I almost ask out loud who. But instead I keep my eyes on Jolene, waiting for her to say more.
“That’s right, Remote, somebody wants to do sign language.”
Only two days before, I saw Connie. She’s still working on getting my hearing date moved up. I told her I didn’t want her to make me look like I wasn’t responsible for what Lester had done.
“But you weren’t, Kathy. We’re not fabricating any of that.” Connie looked at me through the glass, the phone pressed to her ear. I could see small red marks on both sides of her nose from reading glasses or sunglasses. She looked tired, her lips parted, ready to argue against whatever I was about to say. The other visiting cubicles were empty, but I kept my voice to a whisper as I talked into the phone. “I’ll deny it. I’ll say I was sober and never took any pills.”
Connie Walsh shook her head, her lips pressing tightly together. “Then what isour defense, Kathy?”
“I don’t have one. A family is gone.” My throat started to close up and I turned my face away. I put the receiver back on the hook, left the mezzanine, and went back out to the tier where I knew I wouldn’t cry, where I was relieved I didn’t have a voice.
Now I climb the concrete steps to the second tier, thinking it is either Connie or she’s dropped me as her client and it’ll be a new lawyer, one assigned by the state. A blond deputy opens the door for me. Whoever has come is sitting, and I’m not close enough to see who through the glass over the cubicles, one of them taken up by a Chicana girl, her husband or boyfriend on the other side holding the phone to a little girl’s ear. Then, behind the glass a few cubicles down, my brother Frank stands up. He’s wearing a banana-yellow polo shirt, his black hair is moussed back, and there’s a thin gold chain around his neck, a gold watch band on his wrist. He’s gained weight, the curve of his belly pushing his belt buckle a little. He’s squinting into the glass, his hands on his hips, but he doesn’t see me. Then he does and his lips part, his eyes get shiny, and I want to turn and walk back out onto the tier: I hadn’t sent a letter; I hadn’t made one phone call; I guess I was waiting for Labor Day to come and go, for my mother and aunts to drive by the empty house and know Frank had been right, that I was away on a trip and wouldn’t be back for a long time.