Her Bible was stashed beneath her pillow. A gift from a group of well-wishing women from the Moody Bible Institute, it had been given to her on her first night in this cell. Not every new inmate got a Bible, she soon learned. Only the ones who were going to stay long enough to read it. Written in the front cover was a note:
To be free in Christ is to be free indeed.
Her habit since getting the book had been to read one page—the same page—three times a day. Before beginning today’s page, however, she opened to the page she’d read yesterday and reread it. Job 10 was page 419.
Thou knowest that I am not wicked; and there is none that can deliver out of thine hand.
Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.
Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again?
Dana had pondered these words clear until her dreams last night, and she read them now, her finger with its dirt-crusted ragged edge underscoring each word, until a soft clearing of a throat cut through the sound of Annie’s snores. She turned toward the door to see Edna Fontain. As opposite from Mrs. Karistin as could be—small, quiet, and stooped at the waist by the weight of the enormous ring of keys suspended from her belt. It had been Edna Fontain, Effie, who led her across the silent courtyard that day after the rainstorm and into this dark, narrow passage lined with small cells, each with its own barred door. One key for each door, and yet they remained as silent as she, her steady, careful steps discouraging them from clanging together.
“Welcome home,” Effie said that first day. She’d stood, watching dispassionately as Dana shed her thin, tattered dress and stepped into the oversize striped garment that had been left, folded, on the foot of the bottom bunk. “This is the best room on the row. Gets the best light, nice cross breeze in the summer. When it gets cold, I’ll move you down to the corner closer to the furnace.”
It was Effie who brought her little gifts, starting soon after Dana’s arrival just over a year ago. Like the small ticking clock, a feather pillow, a third pair of stockings, and occasional candle stubs for nights when the light from the hallway wasn’t bright enough for reading the most precious gifts of all—books.
The first,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, made her weep through the first chapter with childhood nostalgia. But as she read, she realized how very much her adventure paralleled Alice’s. Always she felt too big, too small, surrounded every day by irrational, incoherent, disconnected women. If only she could wake and find it all a dream.
Then, one month later, the book was gone, another left in its place. Every month thereafter, on her bathing day, something new, delivered in the same way. Most were thin tomes of Western adventure and tragic romance, which Dana read over and over again until the time came when she would leave the book under her pillow and come back to a new one.
Only the Bible remained.
Now, Dana put the strip of silk ribbon—also a gift—in to mark her place and was tying her boots when she heard the faint sound of the key in the door. Quietly she stepped down the rungs and landed on the floor just as the door swung open.
“Good morning, Effie.”
“To you as well, Lundgren.” Effie, nearly two inches shorter than Dana, looked at her with a wrinkled nose. “She’s a stinky one, isn’t she?”
Dana sighed. “And a chatter-head. Kept me up half the night. Do we have to wake her?”
Effie considered. “Won’t get no breakfast if we don’t. But I reckon it won’t hurt her to sleep it off. Fellow might show up with her bail before lunch. Save old Bridewell the cost of a meal, won’t it?”
Dana smiled gratefully and stepped out into the hall, where she waited with the other women until Effie closed and locked the door again. There were a few who, like Dana, wore the striped dress belted at the waist, and others in the clothes they’d been
wearing when they were taken in off the street. These didn’t stay long—only until someone who depended on their income came to pay the municipal fine. Whatever crimes they had committed, Dana hardly knew, as Effie addressed them by their names rather than their crimes. More than that, the woman had taken it upon herself to keep Dana as far away from her fellow inmates as possible.
“You’re nothing but a little seed yet,”
she’d said.
“These already gone to rot. But you? Might grow yourself into something someday.”
To say Effie was kind would be inaccurate. She was simply not cruel, and she carried with her a latent insistence that the women in her charge comport themselves with quiet, unquestioning obedience. There had been one or two over the course of Dana’s confinement who answered Effie’s understated authority with belligerent disrespect, but she’d always managed to find some small token to dissipate their anger. A new, clean comb; a sliver of perfumed soap; fancy, painted buttons for their tattered dresses. And if her gifts didn’t inspire subservience, she’d been known to elbow a rowdy inmate in the kidney so hard as to send the woman to the floor in pain. Such displays were rare, but effective.
The women—there were more than twenty of them this morning, a larger crowd than usual—walked in two lines on either side of the hallway, with Effie setting the pace right in the center. Once they reached the dining hall, they wove into a single line to be served from the vast pot of porridge before taking their places at one of the five long wooden tables.
As was her custom, Dana sat alone while the others gathered into tight groups to complain about the food, never mind that they gulped it down like starving dogs and would end the meal fighting with each other for a second portion. They made disparaging remarks about the comfort of their beds after being
prodded to wakefulness, and they bemoaned the system that would put them in prison, even though most would be returned to their life’s pursuit within a week’s time.
Dana merely listened, keeping her eyes focused on the scarred table in front of her. Deemed an “odd duck,” she heard snickers and stories whispered around and about her, the essence and details of her crime growing with each new wave of inmates, until she was regarded as something monstrous and vile. It was a reputation that granted her solitude, and she bore it with what mustering of dignity she could.
Suddenly two small hands came into her line of vision, and she looked up to see Effie standing in front of her, hands planted on the table.
“Dana Lundgren, you have a visitor.”
The spoonful of porridge turned to paste in her mouth, and she spoke around it. “A what?”
A slow grin stretched across Effie’s face. “A visitor. Lady and a gentleman. I’m to take you to the courtyard.”
“But I’ve never had a visitor.”
“You have one now, don’t you? Finish up.”
She could barely swallow what was in her mouth, let alone imagine eating more as her stomach turned into an impenetrable stone. She slid her half-eaten breakfast for Effie to take and deliver to the next table, where the women feigned disdain to be given scraps from a baby killer’s bowl. At least one of them, Dana knew—a fat one named Lottie who’d been in residence for three months after beating her husband close to death for eating more than his fair share of a beef pie—would tear into it the minute she left the room.
“Who is it?” They were walking past the empty cells, but she whispered in deference to her bunkmate, whose snores still
echoed. “Is it somebody who can tell me about my mother?” And then a new hope seized her. “Is it my mother?”
“You know what I know,” Effie insisted, walking so agonizingly slow as to make Dana want to burst forward and leave her behind. “A lady—not much more than a girl, mind you. And a young man.”
“What do they want?”
“Ask me more questions and I’ll knock you down and send them home.”
Effie might have intended the threat to be humorous and empty, but Dana had seen too many instances of her discipline to take any chances. She bit her lip and slowed her steps, walking with her hands clenched at her sides through the familiar corridors to the open courtyard, where two figures sat side by side on a bench.
“You recognize ’em?” Effie spoke from the corner of her mouth.
“No,” Dana said, though she squinted as if doing so would spark an idea.
At seeing her approach, the visitors stood. The
lady
, as Effie had so generously dubbed her, was probably not much older than Dana, but quite a bit taller, with an enviable glow of health radiating from her dark-toned skin and impressive stature. Her hair was somewhat contained beneath a crumpled hat, but a few dark, springy curls had escaped, and that’s when Dana knew. The last time she’d seen that hair, it had been a mass of braids tied with bright strips of red cloth.
“Carrie?”
In confirmation, the visitor approached with open arms. “I knew it! I knew you’d still be here.”
Dana allowed herself to be taken into the unfamiliar embrace, trying not to stiffen against what was clearly intended to be an
extension of affection, but she could not bring herself to return the gesture in kind. Her arms remained limp at her sides.
“Do you see?” She spoke over Dana’s head. “I told you she’d still be here.”
She stepped away to allow Dana a clearer view of the young man accompanying her. He was equally tall, but with a heftier girth, his face almost perfectly round, his head topped with a crop of close-cut curls.
“This is my cousin Christopher Parker.” Carrie introduced him with a mixture of hero worship and maternal pride. “He came here to visit from Cleveland, and I told him all about you, and he says he’ll be able to help you.”
He was holding his hand out, looking expectant, but Dana simply stared, having no idea what to do with such a gesture. She turned back to Carrie, soaking in her familiarity. She’d stayed at Bridewell for longer than almost any other kid—nearly three months—and had been the closest thing to a friend Dana had ever known.
“How are you?” Dana asked, hardly able to believe she was back after all these years. “Where have you been? You look—” tears threatened to choke her words—“you look so pretty.”
Carrie laughed a beautiful laugh and took Dana’s hand, leading the two to sit on a bench. Her cousin, looking uncomfortable, took a seat on another, and Effie moved to stand behind him.
“As soon as I got out, Mama moved us to Cleveland, near her side of the family. And I tried to write to you a few times, but when I didn’t hear back . . .” She shrugged.
“Mrs. Karistin must have kept your letters from me.”
“That old cow.” Carrie’s eyes darted toward Effie, anticipating rebuke, but she became emboldened at the woman’s passivity. “I never did trust her for nothin’.”
“With good reason,” Dana said. She, too, glanced at Effie as her words ran up against a wall strong enough to trap her story.
The older woman breathed a deep sigh and checked the watch pinned to the bodice of her dark-blue matron’s dress. “You visit,” she said. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
Once, when Dana was very little, her mother had taken her on a train to visit her father. She remembered standing on the platform between the cars, feeling the wind whip across her face as the landscape rolled by in a perpetual blur. She felt like if she jumped, she would take flight. Now, in this unguarded minute, speaking to a friend who lived outside these walls, she had that same sense of freedom, made all the more valuable by its fleeting nature.
“About a year ago, they said they had to move me because I was too old to be housed with the children anymore. But that same day, the warden let all of the children go home. All of them but me. And it’s because, I suppose, I don’t have a mother or a family to go home to. At least, I don’t think I do. I’m not even sure about that. Nobody talks to me. Nobody has told me anything. I’ve never seen another child here since, so maybe they stopped locking them up for good. All I know is that I sit in this room all day, save for a little time in the afternoons when I get to come out here and sit in the sun, breathe in the fresh air. But then they take me back, and they lock me up, like I’m some kind of animal. Worse for me, even than the other women, and I know some of them have done horrible things, and I—I—”
Her voice had risen in pitch and volume as she spoke, until the words were tumbling like water out of a bucket. She had to say them all—every one—before the shamefulness of the picture they created called her to hold them back. She clung to the hand of her friend as if she were holding on to hope itself, telling every event of note from the time they’d last seen each other until this very moment.
“It’s just like Mrs. Karistin said. Nobody knows I’m here. I’ve been forgotten.”
“I didn’t forget you,” Carrie said. “And neither will my cousin.”
It was the first Dana had thought of him since embarking on her tale, and she turned now to give him her full regard.
“Hello,” she said before remembering a long-buried formality. “Nice to meet you.”
“You as well.” His voice was deep, but unnaturally so, as if he were trying to assume an age he hadn’t yet attained. “Carrie says you never had a trial?” It was both a question and a statement, and Dana, quite unused to conversation of any kind, kept silent, puzzled as to how to respond. “You didn’t go in front of a judge. Never heard anyone say, ‘I hereby sentence you . . .’”
“No!” Dana exclaimed, remembering this exact conversation from all those years ago. “I mean, yes, that . . . no. None of those things ever happened to me. And I understand a horrible tragedy occurred, and I have a price to pay. I simply want to know—”
“What the price is?” Christopher Parker asked.
“Yes,” Dana said, whispering now. “And if it’s my whole life, I suppose that’s fair.”
“But nothing is fair without a trial.”
“And you can help me with that?”
Christopher’s eyes glittered, black as onyx. “I hope to, someday.”
She’d been inching forward on her seat, growing more and more invested in the possibility of the answers so long denied, until she heard that word.
Someday.
The same word that had been haunting her own cloudy vision since the morning she woke up in jail.