“I work for the director.”
“On paper, perhaps, but he hired you to help me.”
Valerie sold makeup out of her car, and as a gesture of friendship, Maggie bought a pot of eye shadow even though she worried that the makeup had been tested on defenseless rabbits. While Valerie was dabbing pastes and powders from her sample kit onto Maggie’s face and showing her the results in a handheld mirror, she chattered about the great loves of her life and running off with her current husband to Las Vegas while she was still married to someone else.
“Oh, Johnny and I are all respectable and settled now,” she said. “But we sure had some fun first. Now, tell me about all of the terrible things you’ve done.”
Maggie couldn’t think of any that would interest Valerie. She had once been spanked for losing her house key, and another time she had burned a pan of lasagna and blamed it on her sister. By far the worst thing she had ever done was to strap baby Will into his car seat and forget all about him for an entire hour one autumn afternoon. The idea that if it had been a hot summer day he would have cooked still kept her up at night, but she knew this wasn’t the kind of thing Valerie was after. She had never had an illicit rendezvous in a forest or unbuttoned her blouse behind the bleachers or engaged in heavy petting in the back row of a movie theater or been groped by a stranger in a bar or on a bus. She had never had a doomed first love. Now she knew she never would, and the thought filled her with sorrow for the dark swaths of experience she would never know.
But when she skimmed the prisoners’ files for indications of suppressed evidence or incompetent legal representation, it was as if she had circled around and was approaching the forest from the other side. Whenever she found something particularly egregious, she copied the document and slipped it into Max Gray’s file, and then her nerves would tingle and her lungs would feel as if they might collapse for all the pressure put on them by her heart. What if she was discovered? What if Valerie or DC himself walked in and caught her in the act? On those days, she would breeze through her duties as if she had taken one of the little violet pills Valerie claimed to have taken in her youth.
It seemed as if her energy and confidence was catching, for even Tomás straightened his shoulders and started to speak up in class. He didn’t seem to notice when Maggie forgot to bring him something special, just a bag of candies for the entire group. Instead of whining and looking hurt, he only inquired if she and her family were well.
“Very well, thank you,” Maggie replied, pushing away from the table rather than leaning forward as she usually did.
One day, it was Tomás who leaned forward into the vacant space and asked, “Do you have a dog?” And then he asked, “Why not?”
“No good reason,” said Maggie. “We had a big ol’ cat once, but it ran off.”
“If you had a dog, what would you name it?”
Maggie told him she neither had a dog nor wanted one, so any name she came up with on the spur of the moment wouldn’t mean anything.
“Don’t you like dogs, then?”
“I like dogs as well as I like all God’s creatures.”
“So you like me,” said Tomás.
“Of course I do!” Maggie exclaimed, but she was beginning to wonder if she did.
“If I could change into a dog and go home with you, I would. I’d do it this second. I wouldn’t even think twice.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Maggie cautiously. She was already aware that she had begun to think of Tomás as not quite human, but this was her first inkling that he thought of himself that way. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t really like dogs,” she said.
“Go ahead, tell me to sit,” said Tomás. “Go ahead and tell me to stay.”
He was like a dog with a bone, and he wouldn’t let it drop. “I’d do it. I’d do it for you,” he said a few minutes later, but she didn’t want him to do it. It was the last thing in the world she wanted. “Just give me any command you want,” he said, loudly enough for the whole class to hear.
“You’re not a dog, Tommy!” The instant the diminutive left her lips, she wished she could take it back. A look of triumph spread over Tomás’s features, and he rocked in his chair, leering stupidly at her. All Maggie could do was repeat, “You’re not a dog, and you shouldn’t say you are.”
“But I can be loyal. I can be loyal and true.”
She told him sharply to act like an adult.
“Okay, so then I won’t be loyal if that’s what you want.”
“It’s not about what I want!” cried Maggie in exasperation. It wasn’t Tomás, she knew, but the prison. Still, it was hard to be kind to him after that.
“Well, it’s certainly not about what I want. I want to go back to my girlfriend. I want to live in a little cabin in the mountains. A little cabin with pine floors and a fireplace and maybe a river outside the door. What I want is to be free.”
“Do you Tomás? Do you really?” Maggie was leaning forward now, and Tomás was leaning back. “Then why did you wind up in prison? Why were you wandering around on the streets that day? Why weren’t you in school or at a job?”
“A job,” said Tomás. “Do you really think jobs are so easy to find?”
“And why did you get kicked out of your foster home?”
Tomás had the hangdog expression again, his eyeballs settled in their sockets, his chin tucked, his brow slightly furrowed, and a quivering half-smile tugging at his lips as if he was trying not to cry. But then a light flickered and caught behind his eyes and he said, “How did you know that? How did you know about the foster home?”
Maggie couldn’t have known unless she had read his file or asked some questions about him; either way, it was evidence that she had shown more than the usual interest in him. She ignored the question — what was there to say? Instead of answering, she strode to the front of the room, snatched up the bag of candy, and then marched up and down the rows of desks, passing it to everyone, Tomás last. By the end of the hour, she had recaptured enough of her earlier high spirits to smile and say, “If you really wanted to be free, Tomás, you’d start taking responsibility for yourself. You’d buckle down and use these sessions to pass the high school equivalency test.”
“But how did you know?” asked Tomás again, sucking his yellow teeth as if they were lumps of sticky caramel.
“I only wanted—” But then Maggie stopped herself. Why admit to anything? Why awaken in Tomás something he couldn’t have? She wondered if she was turning callous, like Valerie and the other volunteers, all of whom wore friendly masks and unwavering robotic smiles. What was she supposed to say to someone who couldn’t be free for over two decades even if he got time off for good behavior?
But she was starting with the conclusion. If Tomás was telling the truth about his innocence, it would lead to a different conclusion altogether. “Why did you run from the police, Tomás? Why in God’s name did you run?”
But Tomás was celebrating his little victory over her by smiling and drawing hearts in the margin of his book.
4.0 BLOOD
We were almost to Samarra when the call came to turn the convoy west. The captain told us to deliver the supplies to the school and then catch up with the others. We figured the detour would take us ninety minutes, tops.
I remember thinking, You’re shittin’ me — the school? But Betts said we were doing it, and he was in charge.
The best way to promote peace is to educate the women. I’m probably quoting someone, but I can’t tell you whom.