Afterward it was dismaying, that jail life should just continue. Sometimes I felt as if I’d been on a rocky, slightly dangerous flight. I should have felt relief, maybe a little bravado, laughing off how rough it was, how much worse it might have been. I had apparently won something in the process, and yet the days went on, time went forward in its indefatigable way, as it had before. Although for a while afterward the girls occasionally argued over the finer points of the mystery beating, they seemed to believe that Dyshett was responsible for my bruise and my bandage. Sherry privately assured me that neither Dyshett nor Janet had ever touched me. I wanted to believe her version, because in her absurd and compelling story I was delivered from Dyshett’s blow by my own failing body, a body that seemed at once weak and wise, knowing to give way at an opportune moment. I was sure that Howard and Rafferty, too, would find it implausible. I had bumped my head hard on the metal table and passed out, and then I fell to the floor and banged it again on the cement. Howard might find certain aspects of the narrative perfectly in character, in particular, the fact that I couldn’t bump my head without inciting a race riot.
For the most part the others gave me a wide berth, as if I were someone unpredictable, saintly or loony, they weren’t sure which. I didn’t show myself much, didn’t let on that curled up on my bed under my blue blanket I was nursing my wounds. When Dyshett returned to the pod I was dimly aware that she was subdued, and that the old order had crumbled. Janet was packed off somewhere else, four of last week’s inmates had moved on, and with a new lot Sherry came into her own, ordering Debbie to get a Band-Aid if anyone so much as had a hangnail. She was matronly, firm, her generosity expanding by the day in her self-appointed role. She gave Dyshett Valiums from a stash she had hidden in a sock, and advised her to behave during her sessions with the public defender. She seemed to take it upon herself, for the good of the group, to occupy Dyshett by playing endless games of rummy. If Dyshett were out at a meeting or asleep, Sherry would visit me as if she were a minister making her rounds. It was more fellowship, certainly, than the Reverend
Joseph Nabor from Prairie Center had been able to muster on my account. Sherry routinely saved half of her sandwich from lunch and brought me candy bars from the vending machine. “You got to keep up your strength,” she’d say. “You look like somethin’ plucked with that new hairdo, so the least we got to do is fatten you up.”
I mentioned at one of those bedside chats that although I was sleeping through the daytime drama I was well aware that she was now the undisputed leader.
“Jus’ wait till we get a new warrior in here,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “Jus’ wait till Dyshett perk up a little. She depressed about her life right now, and she droopy from my medicine cabinet, you know, a little a this, some a that, to calm her down. Once she get back in gear we can kiss the peace good-bye.”
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked.
“She lookin’ at five years for scratching that cop,” Sherry said. “That ain’t cheerful news. And you, layin’ in here all day. I think that sort of spook her. She watchin’ you for signs of life. You some big mystery to her, she don’t know if she be afraid, or how much she hate you, or what. It some big mystery, and she don’t like no mystery. That old man she kilt in Chicago, he dead, and now she can brag about him. But you, you still layin’ here, and she don’t know if she should brag and strut. She want to, but I think she afraid a you, she afraid you planning to voodoo her again. She one jumpy girl. I think everything that ever happened to her in her life is catching up with her right about now.”
“Would you mind telling her that I have not and will not voodoo her,” I said.
She leaned over and whispered, “I tell her I ain’t sure about you. I tell her you laying in here whispering to yourself, seems like you saying your spells and mumbo jumbo. That girl, she jus’ about eatin’ outta my hand these days.”
I prepared for Rafferty’s occasional visits by taking a shower, pinching my cheeks, and putting on clean socks. I remember once, as I was getting ready, Sherry, in her capacities as doorman, minister, nurse, and gang leader called out, “Where you going?”
“My man is here,” I said.
“Your man?”
“My man.”
“What he look like?”
“He has a chronic sinus condition,” I said dreamily. “He wears terrible suits of the cheapest magnitude. His hair is slick, like Elvis’s, only it’s speckled with gray, and his goatee has tobacco stains.”
“You sick?” she asked, coming closer with a look of motherly concern on her face.
What I loved about Rafferty, what I felt I surely must have loved about him for all of my life, was the fact that he never once doubted me. When I was taken down to the conference room to meet with him the first time after my arrest, he looked at me and then he shut his eyes, as if for some reason he hadn’t expected to see me in my orange togs, as if they were indecent and offended his sensibility. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” was all I could say, laughing a little at his surprise.
He spit, “I despise these cases,” as if the words themselves were venomous and he wanted them out of his mouth. He was agitated enough to have trouble snapping open his vinyl briefcase. I knew right away that he had the anger Howard wished for me. “I thought these cases were over, a thing of the eighties, but they keep coming on. They keep coming.” Of course, he never looked me in the eye and asked me to say if I’d done it, but I felt that his capacity to know and identify was exact, that he could look at a rare coin and right off say its worth, just as he could quickly size me up and understand that I would never have hurt Robbie or the other boys as I stood accused. “I hate to see you in here,” Rafferty said, as if we were old friends and my condition pained him.
I never asked him if he was going to win my case, or what he thought my chances were. He was an eccentric man, whose personal effects looked to have been frozen about 1957. It was illogical, I knew, but I also felt that he was someone who never passed judgment. I realize now that I always sense that quality in people about whom I feel rapturous. In our meetings I tried to look clearly back over the last year, to tell him everything in proportion. I had hit Robbie, and in my mind both he and I had grown monstrous. Although he was a thin, undernourished child, in my dreams he often had the constitution of a punching bag, something you can knock down all you want and it will always pop right up again. Mrs. Mackessy,
in my mind’s eye, was golden, all flickers and dazzle, slithering down the hall to get her son. For Rafferty I tried to draw them as I had first seen them, nothing more nor less than the sick, neglected boy and his preoccupied mother.
Although Rafferty felt that Robbie Mackessy’s case was relatively simple, there were three other boys who had come forward: Norman Frazer, Anthony Jenkins, and Tommy Giddings. There were also several other children who were being evaluated by the child welfare agency, although Rafferty did not tell me just how many until later. My records showed that I had seen the three boys once or twice during the school year, but I didn’t remember them without some prompting. There were seven hundred children at Blackwell Elementary, and I had never thought that I might have to keep them straight.
“Is there any procedure you do that could be misconstrued?” Rafferty asked, his hands folded, his Bic pen at rest on his empty legal pad. In all those months he worked on my case I only remember him writing something down once. I may have misjudged Rafferty, investing in him qualities that were no doubt preposterous for any criminal lawyer. It doesn’t matter now. I liked the way he was not afraid to watch me. He kept his eyes on me as I tried to think, not as if he were a vulture, waiting for me to stumble, not as if he was trying to determine innocence or guilt, but as if it was his duty to fix his loving gaze on his clients. I think I believed in him, just as a young child believes in his father. He would be there—I was sure of it—keeping watch even if the sky fell down and covered us like a tarp.
“If they’re sick I have them lie on a cot,” I said. “Theresa says that when she was in school the nuns used to warn the girls not to go on a date to a restaurant where white tablecloths were used, because it would remind a boy of bed sheets and drive him wild with desire. Do you suppose a cot is suggestive to a six-year-old boy?”
Rafferty rolled his eyes and threw his head back as if he was gargling.
“I really don’t do much,” I continued. “I’m only a nurse. I can take temperatures and look down someone’s throat and see if it’s red, and then if they say it hurts I send them home. If the parents are at work the children spend the day on the cot or return to class. During health week they all come in and get weighed and measured. The scale is one of those
massive upright contraptions with ominous black weights waiting to fall on someone’s toes. I don’t know, maybe everything is frightening. Last year for health the eighth-grade science teacher wanted me to come in and talk to the class about how AIDS is transmitted, as if the uniform gives me the authority to speak about disease. Sometimes I’m in a hurry; I have a lot to do in the three hours I’m there and I’m sharp. I tell them to hold still, to be quiet, to watch their manners. Maybe anything can be misconstrued, so that one thing eventually becomes another, I mean in such a way that it’s completely changed.”
Down in that barren cubicle it seemed that Rafferty would sit across from me and listen for as long as my mouth opened and shut. “Maybe it isn’t possible to move an inch without being misunderstood. That must be a relief in law, that for everything there is a rule.”
He laughed out loud and then said, “Yes, right, Alice, a relief, all those rules, oh, absolutely.”
“But you see the entire spectrum in school,” I went on. “That’s what’s good about it. We have the undeclared lesbian gym teacher, the homophobic principal, the bleeding-heart liberal teaching social studies, the right-wing Christian sneaking in his stuff in earth science—”
“But can you think of anything specific?” Rafferty prodded.
“Yes! Yes—I can think of thousands of specific things, some I did, some I dreamed, some I feared. I lie quaking when I remember certain days. I was walking down the hall last spring, and the gym teacher, as a matter of fact, Miss Orin, called me in to take a look at a girl’s back, a junior-high girl who was changing in the locker room. Miss Orin was concerned about this girl’s spine. She was having them parade around for some kind of posture exam but you have to understand, I’m an LPN: I don’t know anything! I just ran my hand down the girl’s back, the way I would if it were my daughter, to see if I could feel ribs in the wrong place. I only know about scoliosis because I was evaluated for it when I was a teenager. My father may have thought that I was so isolated and withdrawn, like a Victorian heroine, that I probably at least had gout. I remember leaving the locker room, feeling the girls’ eyes on me, knowing that they were going to start whispering about the homo gym teacher, the homo nurse. Junior-high girls are like savages, you know? I tried to wave my left hand with my wedding ring around, to remind them that I’m
Mrs
.
Goodwin. But I knew they’d talk about us all the same. Sometimes I used to have the urge to crack up in front of those girls, to rave about the passionate crushes I’d had on women teachers when I was young, but how as I grew older it was the dear, ecstatic act of copulation that spurred me on—Do you see what I mean, they were so snide and sure in their disgust that one somehow wanted to knock them off their perches?”
Rafferty nodded, blowing his stuffy nose into a red bandanna.
After I looked at the records I remembered that Norman Frazer, a kindergartner, had come to my office, because of a very loose and bloody tooth. He seemed to be one of those volatile children, like Emma, who can not take the unexpected in stride. His tooth was hanging by a thread, his bloody saliva slipping down his chin as he howled. I’m sure the teacher sent him to me because he was disrupting the class. “Am I supposed to go find a picture of a tooth, show him the roots, try to educate?” I asked Rafferty. “One child is on the cot throwing up, another is waiting for medicine; I don’t have time!
“Norman was hysterical, nothing to do but hold him around his stomach with one arm and, reaching around with the other, pull out the tooth. It was so loose it came away with a pluck. It was a pluck, not a pull. I didn’t even wear my gloves as I should have, to protect myself from his blood. He was so surprised he stopped in the middle of his screech. We put the tooth in an envelope and he went back to the classroom. Howard thought it was terrible, that I had violated the child’s body. Once he made some comment to Emma and Claire, that they should watch their teeth. The remark bothered me more than I let on. Norman was so busy screaming he hadn’t really noticed, until I had the tooth in my hand.”
“That’s all you know of him?” Rafferty asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The only thing I remembered about Anthony Jenkins, another of the boys, was that he had skinned his knee and I had poured disinfectant over the gritty wounds. He had trembled with the pain and growled deep in his throat. Rafferty got a hold of a class picture so I could see what the third boy, Tommy Giddings, looked like, and still it sparked no memory. According to my log I had given him a dose of Amoxicillin for an ear infection in October. They all claimed that I had shouted, spanked, hit
them across the face, held them down, that I was pernicious and preyed upon them with the greed and toothiness of a shark.
At one of our meetings, when we were trying to find any possible association between the boys and Robbie Mackessy, Rafferty leaned over the table and asked me if I was ever afraid. It was an early session, before my run-in with Dyshett. I looked to the pale yellow cinder-block wall, wondering what I should say, and also relishing, for a moment, his steadfast attention. Did he mean, I wondered, was I afraid of death? My girls have an animal terror of death, as I did at their age, but I had begun to think that I had lost that particular instinct. I wanted to avoid dying not least so that Emma and Claire wouldn’t have to go through the trauma of having a dead mother. I had seen enough death to know that it isn’t anything more startling than taking a next breath. My best and fondest hope for the hereafter was that there was some kind of design and that it was trustworthy. Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.