Afterburn

Women's Correctional Facility Bedford Hills, New York September 7, 1999

Paint a perfect blue sky, paint it the color of a robin's egg or a child's balloon, then frame that perfect blueness with a double set of forty-foot-high chain-link fences, each topped by five feet of double-bladed steel concertina wire, and on the corners of the compound add a tower with a gray-uniformed guard sitting at the ready with a heavy AR-15-firing capacity two hundred rounds per minute, range three hundred and fifty yards. Now move your gaze inward from those shimmering boundaries across the grass being mowed by a handful of women in forest-green uniforms and toward the irregular compound of brick buildings, some, such as the hospital building, one hundred years old, and all of them in distinctly poor repair-paint peeling from window frames, bricks needing repointing, sidewalks cracked-and past the women in green pushing laundry hampers toward the West Wing psych unit, where more women in green, either delusional, depressed, or criminally insane (including the woman from upstate who killed four babies), sit watching television, rocking ceaselessly as a side effect of the medications, and then you must compel yourself onward, past the building where the women sleep in tiny rooms (adorned with pictures cut from magazines, letters from home, small shrines to children and family) toward a facility that awaits the most contradictory of populations. On the top floor rests a set of cells designed for women sentenced to execution, the possibility of that fate coming courtesy of the solemn campaign promises of New York State's latest governor, and, on the floor below, a spotless nursery of sixteen rooms for women who have come to prison pregnant, those who have been impregnated by their husbands on conjugal visits (which, though against the rules, happens), or, less frequently, but not unheard of, those who have been impregnated in one of the consensual sexual liaisons that occur between the male guards and the women, the purposes of which, for the women, include the procurement of cigarettes, drugs, food, cosmetics, and, without being confused for affection, a welcome contrast to the flesh of another woman (that form of intimate contact being easy to find; the prison, all there know, is full of women kissing and hugging and diddling and tonguing and finger-fucking each other). Then you come to the small single rooms, where the women have been bedded with their newborns-where, as did their own mothers, they've learned to nurse and feed and wipe and whisper their babies to sleep. The hallway outside is gloomy but spotless, and it was here, one afternoon heavy and damp with summer, while pushing her dry mop down the linoleum, that a slender woman of twenty-seven stopped and stood listening, her eyes cast over her shoulder. A tight rope of dark hair hung down her back. She was not pretty, not exactly, but something quieter and more complicated-yes, there was something about Christina Welles that you remembered later, her fierce watchfulness, perhaps, or the silent concentration that suggested an intelligence that had no need to explain itself to others, but watch out if it did. Or you may have noticed the sadness that rested in her face when she was looking down, a sadness she felt but preferred to hide. Or it may have been none of these. What you would not have seen was a face that invited attention, welcomed conversation. Her brown eyes cut sideways at people before she decided whether she liked them, and though she had a rather devilish smile, it was rarely seen. She wished she could be more open and generous toward others, and counted her distrust among the things she did not like about herself. I don't say enough, she told herself, unless I am angry or in love, and then I say too much. Then I say everything.

Listening now, she could overhear the ritual that took place each time a woman came to live in the prison nursery with her newborn, a ritual utterly contrary to human nature, yet unremarkable in this place for its bureaucratic regularity, its numbed procedurality; they were taking another baby away from his mother. I don't want to see this, Christina thought, her fingernails pressing the mop handle. But she lingered outside the mother's room, just close enough to see the baby boy, whose name was Nushawn, being held by his mother, Shannelle, one last time. The maternity ward administrator, a kindly woman in her forties, watched, too, as did the relative who would take care of Nushawn until his mother was free-years hence. How long, Christina wondered, how long will they let Shannelle hold her baby? The answer was not long enough, never long enough. Now Shannelle collapsed in grief around Nushawn, who, unknowing, patted at a yellow barrette in her hair. Shannelle had come to Bedford Hills pregnant, after she and her sister had gone out one night to buy candy and two men had come up and asked them where So-and-so lived. The girls, nobody's fools, may have expected an incentive for their trouble, and after a brief negotiation walked the men over to the house in question, a distance of no more than a block, and when they knocked on the door, the police were inside, having just arrested its inhabitants for cooking and selling crack. The two girls got different public defenders, one a realist, the other a fool; Shannelle was assigned the fool, a recent law graduate of Harvard. Her sister agreed to a plea, avoided a trial, and got a year. Shannelle's lawyer convinced her that she was innocent and that he would make an impassioned defense if she'd allow him to take her case to trial. It was the first time a white, college-educated male had ever shown such an interest in her, and so she fearfully agreed to his proposition. The jury found her guilty in forty minutes, and the judge reluctantly sentenced her according to the harsh edicts of the Rockefeller drug laws, which meant Shannelle received three years to life.

"All right now," sighed the nursing administrator, signaling the moment of removal. Shannelle crushed her son against herself, then looked up, eyes full. "You know I'll just die in here," she moaned. "I can't, I can't." But her baby was gently lifted from her and placed in the arms of the waiting relative.

Don't look anymore, Christina told herself. She pushed her mop along the floor, over the exact edges of linoleum she'd traveled the day prior. The weeks and months were eating at her, going slower, not faster. What at first had been unendurable she had learned to suffer, and what had seemed inconsequential now stood as intolerable. Years were dragging by at the rate of decades, it seemed; time was killing her as it killed all the women there, making them sag and sicken, fatten and wrinkle, taking their hope and children and teeth. She had three years before the parole board would hear her case. Four down, three to go. Of course, seven years represented only the minimum sentence for conspiracy to possess stolen property. The maximum was twenty-five. If you misbehaved, they added time-simple as that, and nearly every other prisoner who reached the minimum sentence returned to prison with a tale of the parole board's injustice. So you tried to build a behavior record, you tried to be agreeable and silent. Yes, she thought bitterly, here I am, so agreeable, so silent. The word, in fact, was powerless — she'd been so powerless for four years now, had tried to live by the endless fucking rules, and it hadn't worked. She was not repentant. She was not rehabilitated. She was not "corrected." How absurd that she'd ended up in prison. Sure, if she could go back in time, she wouldn't ever repeat the idiotic behavior that had landed her there. She should have quit before the very last job, told Tony Verducci and Rick that she was done with them, and everything would have been different. Yet knowing this was no consolation now, today. She had to do something, had to find out something about herself. She was willing to suffer the punishment. Maybe she wanted the punishment. She wanted something.

A urine test cup, in fact. She wanted one of the small, crushable paper cups that the maternity unit used, sealed on the inside so that no fluid seeped out. She needed this cup; she'd been thinking about this cup for two weeks now. If she actually used it as she planned, then she assumed some retribution from the guards would come her way. They punched you out in the showers, or tore up your room on a search, which in her case meant that they'd be eager to confiscate or otherwise ruin her books, the only thing of value to her in her cell. Well, fuck them, and fuck that. The more important question was whether she might be delaying her own parole, if the thing went bad, and as she evaluated the odds, she had to conclude that, yes, she was running a risk. Yet that question remained far-off, theoretical. The problem with Mazy was here and now. Besides, Christina had been good, had avoided fights and taken all the classes she could, and used the library, pathetic and remedial as it was, and generally put up with everyone and their attitudes and their mind games, yet here was Mazy threatened with a couple of months in the SHU by Soft T. For nothing. No, not for nothing. Mazy wouldn't give the guard what he wanted. Mazy had three children who hadn't seen their mother in four months, and if she went into the segregated housing unit before they were due to visit in a few days-well, they all would suffer, and who knew what crazy stuff Mazy might try. She'd attempted suicide once years ago, but Christina was less worried about that than she was that Mazy would go into the SHU and then come out crazy or zombied-in which case she'd start to accumulate violations and go back into the SHU for real reasons, and maybe for a long time.

But Christina couldn't let that happen. They had an understanding, she and Mazy. She was stronger than Mazy, at least on the outside. But when they lay together, Christina's head on Mazy's dark fallen breasts, their delta of stretchmarks strangely beautiful, she felt peaceful. She could rest there, in the smell of talcum powder under Mazy's armpits and between her legs. Mazy understood. Rest now, baby. Mazy was too good for the place, too good for almost anywhere, which was why she'd been hurt so many times. She wished only to love and be loved, even once confessing to Christina that she wished she could heal babies and children by laying her hands upon them. That she couldn't was a genuine sorrow to her.

In the hallway Christina passed Kathy Boudin, the Vietnam-era revolutionary who with others had robbed a Brink's armored truck in 1981. Boudin, a distinguished-looking older woman now, still organized, still agitated, but for the inmates with AIDS. Some sympathizers had tried to break her out of Bedford Hills years back, rolling a truck up to the chain-link fence. But most of the women were in for crimes far less exotic, drug charges or assault. A good percentage were in for murder-almost always of their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes their children. You never asked directly what people had done, yet word got around. Many of the nine hundred women there knew one another from the city, and the population included sets of sisters and cousins, and, amazingly enough, even one of grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter.

Now Christina pushed the mop toward the maternity unit's kitchen, where Dora was washing out plastic nursing bottles.

"Okay, I'm here," Christina called softly. "You get it?"

Dora, a heavyset woman of fifty, looked up. "No, Miss Metzger locked the closet."

"I'll get it, then."

"Oh, honey, I don't want you to do this," Dora whispered. She was in for the rest of her life for dropping a television on her sleeping husband's head and then setting fire to him. She'd seen dozens of younger women thrash and scream and hurt themselves through their time in the prison.

"Everybody think you going be sorry you do this," warned Dora. "They catch you doing this, that's a Tier 3 offense. They throw you in the SHU, where nobody can check up on you, girl. How you going read them books you like? How you going get some sleep and exercise, they throw you in there?"

"He's going to put Mazy in the SHU," Christina said.

"Can't be sure of that."

"Yes, I can. He's threatened her over and over, and he knows her kids are coming. He's putting pressure on her. She's got her whole family coming this Saturday."

"I know." Dora nodded. "But it's too dangerous."

"Call Miss Metzger for me."

"Oh, I don't think-"

"Just do it, Dora."

The heavy woman shuffled down the hallway, and Christina stood next to the door of the supply closet, which was large enough to hold the maternity unit's stock of disposable diapers, stacked in jumbo packs to the ceiling, as well as shelves of pacifiers, boxes of ointment for diaper rash, battery-powered breast pumps, and other necessities, including, she knew, the urine test cups.

"Christina?" came a peevish voice down the hall, followed by an officious jangling of keys-Miss Metzger, the assistant nursing administrator, a stickish woman of forty in red curls who, as far as Christina was concerned, spent too much time with her clipboard and not enough time practicing how babies got made. "Dora says there's a problem with the closet."

"I noticed earlier that you need more diapers," Christina said.

"Mmmn, I don't think so," Miss Metzger answered with friendly condescension, confident of her tastefully lurid makeup, her third-rate nursing degree, and her ability to choose sensible shoes. "We just got them in a few days ago." She put a territorial hand on the doorknob.

This babe looks likes she's been trying to have sex with her lipstick, Christina thought. "I'll show you, okay?"

"Maybe you should finish the hall."

"I will, but let me show you."

Miss Metzger opened the closet door and stood back. Christina had been in the closet dozens of times and quickly studied the diaper supply, noting the two sizes of diapers and counting the packages.

"It looks good to me," Miss Metzger said.

Christina sighed. "We have eight babies in the ward now, after Nushawn is gone?"

"Yes."

"And I heard two are coming Thursday?"

Miss Metzger nodded. "Yes, that's right."

"You have twenty-seven days until the next diaper delivery?"

"Well, I don't-Let's see." Miss Metzger pulled out a pocket calendar scrawled with reminders and appointments. "Yes, it's twenty-seven days. So"-she swept her hand at the immense wall of diapers-"I think we really do have enough, don't you?"

"No, Miss Metzger, I really don't."

"Why?"

"Well, the babies each use about seven diapers a day," Christina began, stepping into the closet, the urine test cups on a shelf near her head. "It averages out to that. Seven diapers a day multiplied by twenty-seven is one hundred and eighty-nine diapers per baby until the next shipment comes. So, for the eight babies, it's one thousand, five hundred and twelve to last them the whole twenty-seven days."

Christina paused. She knew her math was right; it always was.

Miss Metzger nodded importantly. "Okay, I understand."

"But two more babies arrive in two days, and even assuming that they arrive with a few diapers each, you'll need twenty-four days times seven, times two, which is three hundred and thirty-six diapers. Fifteen-twelve plus three-sixteen is eighteen-forty-eight. The jumbo packages of newborn size you have in there have thirty-two diapers in each. To cover your requirements, you need fifty-eight packs of the newborn size. I count only fifty-four."

Miss Metzger stared dully at the wall of diapers.

"But it's more complicated than that. Three of those babies are almost three months old. They're ready to start wearing size small in, say, two weeks. If the diapers are too tight, then it's-it's a rash of diaper rashes. So, for those babies, you need three babies times seven diapers daily times thirteen days, which is two hundred and seventy-three size small diapers. I see you have there eight packets of the smalls, which contain twenty-eight diapers each. Eight times twenty-eight is two hundred and twenty-four. So, if you bump those three babies up in two weeks, then you're forty-nine size small diapers short."

Miss Metzger stepped toward the wall of diapers, frowning to herself, and that was exactly when Christina pocketed one of the urine test cups.

"But if you order more size smalls, we can subtract the two hundred and seventy-three diapers from the original total requirement of eighteen forty-eight newborn size, which leaves fifteen seventy-five newborn. That number divided by thirty-two, the number in each packet, comes out to forty-nine-point-two size newborn packets. You have fifty-four. So, if you reorder size small, you'll definitely have enough size newborn."

"I see," said Miss Metzger uncertainly.

"But if you don't order more size small, then you'll be forced to use size newborn for all the babies all the time. And with the new babies coming, you'll run out. Let's see-you have fifty-four packets and you need fifty-eight. That's four times thirty-two, which is one twenty-eight. At ten babies-three of whom probably have diaper rash because their diapers are now too tight-times seven diapers a day"-Christina glanced at her watch, remembering the problem with Soft T-"seventy diapers every twenty-four hours… and you're one twenty-eight short… it's the early afternoon now, so you'll run out of diapers sometime in the morning of the twenty-sixth day. One day short before the truck comes."

"Oh."

"Of course, you could ration the diapers, Miss Metzger. But you'd have to get all the women to cooperate and agree not to use more than six a day, or, more precisely, thirteen in a two-day period. But if they count wrong, or cheat, or are too sleepy in the morning to remember how many times they changed the baby, then you could still end up with ten babies with no fresh diapers for twelve or fifteen hours twenty-seven days from now. It's close, either way. All this is assuming you don't get a kid or two with diarrhea. You could also ration the diapers so successfully that you run out of them at exactly the time the truck is due, but there's a problem there, too."

"There is?" asked Miss Metzger worriedly.

"Yes. I've noticed that the delivery truck arrives between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, with no real pattern to-"

"So?" Miss Metzger interrupted.

"So let me continue."

"There's no need to be rude."

"My point exactly." Christina switched the mop to her other hand. "Now, it also happens that the truck will be delivering paper napkins in bulk, for the meal room, where they claim they feed us something they call food. The napkins are on a six-week delivery cycle, okay? I know because I've worked in the kitchen. The cycle corresponds to every third diaper delivery. Same provisioning company, same truck, same driver. Sometimes it's diapers, sometimes it's napkins, sometimes both. But the kitchen loading dock is closer to the main gate than we are, here in the nursery, and so that's the first stop. They load the truck that way, too-napkins at the back of the truck, first to unload. The driver of that truck is Puerto Rican and he likes to bullshit with Luis, the guy in the kitchen, about Cuban baseball players, what the best dance clubs in the city are, how nasty their girlfriends are-wait, are you nasty, Miss Metzger?"

"Nasty?" The woman's carefully drawn eyebrows lifted, suspicious of the question. "I suppose I am."

"Oh, Miss Metzger, so am I!" Christina cried. "Or I used to be. I used to be very nasty. And you know what?"

"Tell me, Christina, if you must," the nursing administrator sighed.

Christina bent closer. "I liked it, too." She straightened up. "Anyway, those he-men at the loading dock are, in our high-powered diaper supply analysis, enjoying the kind of intellectual discussion you get with guys who don't understand the importance of diapers, and so, on top of the twenty minutes of slow-motion unloading of kitchen napkins, Miss Metzger, you can add at least thirty minutes of chinga las putas and other learned observations, which, added up, is fifty minutes, minimum. So, if you, Miss Metzger, you, have rationed the diapers perfectly but now are sweating the last diaper or two on that day, the twenty-seventh day from now, and you are using an average of one diaper per baby every three hours when the babies are awake, then, with ten babies, that extra fifty minutes is, from a probability basis, going to require another three diapers. Three more tiny wet behinds while those guys sit on their thumbs."

"You just figured this out?"

"I was passing the room yesterday and saw the diapers inside. You can tell by looking."

"Oh," said Miss Metzger, recovering herself. "I'm sure we would have realized the problem."

Maybe, Christina thought a minute later, but of course not. She walked briskly toward the prison hospital. She didn't have much time; she was due inside the hospital in fifteen minutes for more maintenance work that didn't need to be done. Good thing she liked sweeping, always had, for it calmed her. Outside the dispensary stood a long line of women waiting to be handed their daily dose of AZT, or methadone, or Prozac, or whatever else kept them alive. In the SHU they brought your medicine to you, if they remembered. The whole point was to punish. In the box you got a cot and a hot and no more-the rooms in the SHU were cement cells, zoo cages. Not much of a penalogical advancement from, say, eighteenth-century London, modern toiletry the only great difference. Twenty-three hours a day inside, one out. No television, no cooking for oneself, no books, no visits, no music, no work. Just time. Just time and picking at your fingernails and masturbating and listening to the soft rush of the plumbing system and cooking imaginary meals and telling yourself that your life was not over yet and wishing you had been nicer to your father and masturbating again and picking your teeth with a fingernail and doing a thousand sit-ups and hearing the girl in the next cell banging her head on her steel door. Soft T could deliver you into this vacuum. All he needed to do was scribble on his fucking clipboard a couple of times in a week and you were gone. He'd told Mazy that she had to blow him once a month, the first time being a minute from now behind the hospital. Soft T had a thing for big women, and Mazy, softly expanded by grief and exhaustion to more than three hundred pounds, excited all of Soft T's spittled sadism. The more immense his victim, the larger his conquest. He did not see Mazy's maternal gravity and private generosities, the loveliness hidden by the half dozen scars melted into her face decades prior by a drunken father holding an electric clothes iron. As for Mazy, the prospect of bending her bulk to the ground to service Soft T's quivering viciousness terrified her, and she'd confessed to Christina she'd never been able to do that to a man; the act made her sick. Something had happened with an uncle when she was a girl, and she'd never been able to forget it. What if she tried to do it to Soft T and started to weep? He'd become furious, maybe he'd hit her, maybe he'd put her in the SHU anyway. Watching Mazy, seeing the old, never-forgotten frenzy come into her eyes, Christina had decided. She'd take the chance. At first she'd considered a weapon-you could get a shank if you really needed one-but then she'd realized that Soft T would quickly overpower her, perhaps even beat her for her trouble, and then, having attacked a guard, she'd end up in the SHU for at least a year, unable to help Mazy or herself, for that matter. There had to be a better way, she'd concluded to herself, a trickier way, and in fact, there was.

Soft T was waiting in the hidden, shadowed space behind the hospital, his hands on his fat waist, the armpits of his uniform dark crescents of sweat. He looked up at Christina. "Where's Mazy?"

"She had a scheduling conflict."

"She ain't coming?"

"Nope."

He blinked, disbelief preceding anger. "She sent you to tell me that?"

"No."

"What're you doing? I'll report you being down here."

"I'm taking Mazy's place. I do you, you keep off her."

Soft T's heavy face stared into hers until he understood. "All right, girl, but you better be good."

"You wouldn't know what good is."

"You can say any shit you want." He laughed. "But you still got to do it."

The ground was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, and trash. Some of the guards brought rubbers along, some didn't. Soft T never demanded actual vaginal sex from any of the women.

He rubbed his belly, and when he lifted his shirt, she noticed the soft, toffee-colored flesh around his hips. "All right now, come to Daddy," he said, his open hands at his waist.

"You can unzip yourself, you fucker."

"No, you can do that, too."

She knelt down on the old piece of plywood that had been thrown over the ground, her knees hard against it, and unzipped Soft T's pants. No one could see them. I'm doing this for you, Mazy, she thought, I can take the SHU.

She pulled out Soft T's penis, which was short and thick and smelled of cologne, and leaned close to him. He needed a little working and she did this brusquely. He stiffened. She moved her head back and forth. Her mouth was numb, she felt nothing. To imagine that she'd once enjoyed this sometimes-well, that was a long time ago.

"That's good," he rasped. "You like it."

She shook her head, mouth full.

"You're lying. You like it."

She pulled her head back. "Dream your sick dreams."

He pushed her head down, laughed. "Dang, girl, you good."

She kept at it, two hands at once, fast.

"Tight, make it tight." His breathing quickened, his legs started to shake. "All right," he moaned. "All right. Okay."

She pulled him out as he came. White ribbons of semen stuck to her face and lips.

"That's right," said Soft T, slapping his penis against her cheek, "go on and make a mess of yourself." He laughed and zipped up. Then he reached out and squeezed her cheek. "You a hot bitch, you know that?" He looked hard into her face. "Next time I want a smile."

As Soft T disappeared around the corner of the building on his way back to his shift, Christina removed the small urine cup from her pocket. Using the cup's firm lip to scrape against her cheek, she collected the semen on her face, not all of it, but certainly a few teaspoons. She pressed the top of the cup together, matching the two edges perfectly, and then withdrew a tape dispenser from her other pocket. She taped the top of the cup shut, then wiped her tongue and teeth against the left sleeve of her shirt, her lips and cheeks against the right. Last, she spat-hard as she could.

Some of the other women knew what she had planned and watched from afar as she stalked toward the administration building. Dolores, a Dominican girl raking grass clippings, cried, "You get it?"

Christina nodded.

"You go, girl," she called.

Christina walked into the administration building. "I want to talk to the Dep," she told the guard, a man known as Rings because he sported at least five on each hand.

"Why?"

"Something important."

"He busy."

"I heard something about one of the girls having some strong stuff inside."

Rings looked at her with suspicion, having listened to all manner of requests, lies, and outrageous assertions over the years. But, Christina knew, he had to let her through. Heroin was coming out of Mexico these days, cheap and strong. The snortable stuff sometimes got inside. If one of the women died, then it was his ass on the end of a string. The deputy warden, a tight bantam of a man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, was known to be smart, tough, and completely unfair. He also wanted to be a warden at one of the state's men's prisons, an inherently political position, and so he had to appear to have a record of running as clean an operation as possible. Female inmates dying of heroin overdoses were not in the plan.

"You tell me what it is," said Rings.

"No." Christina shook her head. "You gotta give me the Dep."

The guard picked up his keys and clipboard, unlocked the barred door, disappeared behind it, and locked it again. In a minute he was back, a look of surprise on his face. "All right."

She proceeded through the bars and down the cement-block hallway to the deputy warden's office, feeling the air conditioning touch her face. The deputy warden stood at his desk, a little man in a bad suit, and waved his hand in front of his chair. "Miss Welles, you-"

"I got something to talk about, but not what I told Rings."

The deputy warden lifted his hand to interrupt.

"No, wait, wait, Dep, let me talk," she said. "Soft T has been terrorizing the women."

"Mr. Thomas?"

"Mr. Thomas. He's using the clipboard to get sexual favors for himself."

The deputy warden sat down. "That's a very serious charge."

"I know it's a very serious charge." She could guess what he was thinking, because the wiring inside the prison was plain to anyone who had been there a few months: The prison generally let the guards get away with as much as they could, but a guard who was proven to have forced sex onto a female prisoner subjected the prison to the sensationalistic and synergizing effects of news reports, watchdog agency press conferences, civil lawsuits, and TV-movie deals. And then he had to be removed, which, the union correctly pointed out, deprived the man of his livelihood, guards being generally unqualified to do much else-the job required subservience to a military chain of command, tolerance for extreme boredom, a masked but present desire to abuse weaker human beings, and last but by no means least, the ability to attack and, if necessary, beat a woman.

The deputy warden saw that Christina was resolute. "Go on," he said.

"He's forcing women to give him blow jobs."

"You?"

She held his gaze. "Me."

"When?"

"About five minutes ago."

He nodded noncommittally and whisked his hands across his desk, as if sweeping away grains of irritation. The gesture carried an entire mindset-two decades of professional tedium, a thousand forgotten memos, a hundred remembered alimony payments, beer cans in an otherwise empty refrigerator, dead flies on the windowsill. "You know my problem, Miss Welles, it's his word against yours."

She waited until he seemed sure that she had no response. And then longer, creating enough silence to break his certainty.

"I've got proof."

The deputy warden folded his arms. He'd heard everything in his time. Christina slipped her hand into her pocket. "Here. Don't take my word for it." She put the little paper cup on the warden's desk. "That's his-his ejaculate. You have that tested, get the DNA or whatever they do, and then test him, Dep. He just shot that all over my face five minutes ago. You go ask him how I got that, okay? I didn't steal it from him, you know what I mean?"

The deputy warden picked up the little paper cup. He tore the tape off, looked inside, and nodded. Then he raised his eyes to Christina. "That's it, then," he said.

She didn't understand his tone. "What? You're not going to do anything?"

"I am going to do something, as a matter of fact." The deputy-warden pushed the cup to one side on his desk. "But when and in what manner is not your business. However"-he glanced at a couple of papers on his desk-"we have something else much more important to talk about."

She couldn't believe it. He wasn't going to do anything about Soft T. "What?" she spat, thinking bitterly of what she had just put herself through. "What do we have to talk about that is more important than what I just told you, Dep?"

"This." He was holding a piece of paper. "You're due to appear in court tomorrow, Miss Welles."

"Court?"

"State Supreme Court."

"I don't get it."

"Your lawyer never contacted you, I see."

"Nobody told me anything," she breathed, afraid now. "They can't be adding on to my sentence, they aren't-"

"No, no," the deputy warden interrupted, his voice both disgusted and amused. He handed the heavy stationery to Christina. The letter was from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office: You are hereby directed to produce Christina Welles, inmate number 95G1139-112D, in State Supreme Court, New York County, Part 47, for a 440.10 motion request. It is anticipated by this office that the motion to vacate the inmate's conviction and sentence will be signed by the Court. We have been unable to contact the inmate's family members. Please advise the inmate of her anticipated change in status and prepare her for her imminent release.

She looked up at the deputy warden. He nodded silently, his mouth shut. The air conditioner in the window battered out a hum. She glanced back at the letter. Signed by her own prosecutor, whom she'd last seen at the sentencing hearing, where she'd received her seven years, no thanks due to her attorney, Mrs. Bertoli, a meat-faced hack lawyer who worked out of a castle of hack lawyers on lower Broadway. Why had the prosecutor written the letter? She barely remembered him, a faceless man in his late twenties who wanted to know everything about her life before she'd been arrested, wanted to understand how a young woman like her had become a felon-unlike Mrs. Bertoli, who was just putting in the time for a fee, the fee Rick had so magnanimously agreed to pay using money Christina had earned for him. But Christina had not been cooperative with the prosecutor, and he had marched through the charges relentlessly. She had accepted her conviction, breathed it in like a mountain, seen it as the logical result of a life out of control. Too many wrong choices in a row, and you ended up in the bad place.

"I'm getting out?" she said now, trying to keep her voice even.

"Yes," the deputy warden replied, face tight.

She blinked. "Wait, this never happens."

"Never, usually."

"I can't believe it."

The deputy warden's eyes were cold. "I can."

That night she stood under the cell's single lightbulb and packed her things in a black plastic trash bag. Not much. A few books, her music tapes. Five pairs of panties, two pairs of pants, three T-shirts, one ugly dress, and a pair of sneakers. A mail-order bra. Her hairbrush, her toothbrush, dental floss, Tampax, a small bottle of aspirin. She didn't own any makeup. Among her papers were photos of her mother and dead father and an out-of-date address book. Everyone from her former life had moved on or died or married or otherwise departed. She hadn't kept up with people. She'd wanted to forget them and for them to forget her.

Mazy stood watching, crying quietly, the wetness catching in the asymmetrical grooves in her cheeks. "Maybe you come back visit me."

"I can't, Mazy," said Christina. "I'm going to miss you, but I can't ever come back here."

Mazy handed her a small bottle of perfume. "I don't have anything else to give you."

Christina kept packing. "You don't need to give me anything."

"I ain't ever known anyone like you. You're not like the rest of us here."

"I'm like everybody, Mazy."

"Everyone going remember what you did today. Everyone already talking about it. They dragged old Soft T right out of here this afternoon. Took his keys away."

Mazy glanced down the hallway, then back at Christina, eyes soft, smiling sweetly.

Christina shook her head. "I can't, Mazy."

"It's our last time."

"I can't. My mind is already out of here." She looked at the ceiling. She knew every crack, every flake of paint waiting to fall. One more night and she'd never see the cell again.

Mazy stepped near but did not touch her. "You don't want come be close one last time?"

I'll cry about Mazy later, she told herself. "I'm sorry, Mazy. I've got so much to think about now."

Mazy sighed. "You going go back to men?"

"That's not what I'm thinking about right now."

"I know, but I was just wondering."

"I haven't been thinking about it, Mazy, I really haven't."

She turned. Mazy's big calm eyes were fixed on her. "I'm pretty sure you going do that," Mazy said, her voice affectionate. "That's who you are, baby."

"We'll see."

"No, I'm pretty sure."

Maybe it was true. It was definitely true. It was so true that she felt something in her knees just thinking about it.

"I miss men," Mazy said. "I miss my Robbie, he my youngest's daddy, he one of the biggest men I ever seen."

"Yeah, I knew a guy who was full of muscles," Christina replied, if only to talk the remaining time away.

"Who was he, baby?"

"He was the asshole who got me into this place."

"You never talked about it."

"I told you things, Mazy. I told you what I could."

"I know that girl Katisha? She went out of here after four years, and then she called up one of the gals and she had something like ten men that first week she was out."

Christina nodded, remembering. "That's truly insane."

"You going call your sweet mother down Florida?"

She wanted to, but it might be a bad idea. "I'm not sure."

"She'll miss you so much."

Christina dropped the bag to the floor. "I might let her think I'm still here."

Mazy frowned with incomprehension. "That's hard."

She tightened. Yes, it was.

Her parole had been so far off that she hadn't allowed herself to think about what it would be like to live in Manhattan again. But now, after only a few hours, all kinds of things crowded her mind. She'd need money, that was certain. She had just over three hundred dollars in her prison account, and if she could somehow live on that for a couple of weeks, she'd be okay. She'd get a job and rent a room downtown, near First or Second Avenue. Start all over. No flashy moves. Be careful what she said to people. You could live on almost nothing if you had to. You spent every dollar carefully, that's all. She wanted to walk along the streets, look at the store windows. She'd buy a small radio and lie on her bed and listen to WCBS-FM, the oldies station. She'd read magazines in the bookstore. She missed all the magazines, even the trashy ones. She'd go to the movies, just sink into one of those seats with a Coke and some popcorn. She wanted to see a Jack Nicholson movie. Anything he was in. Yes. She would take a bath, her first in four years. Watch the water go down the drain and fill it up again, hot as she could stand it. She'd watch the beautiful little babies in the park and think, Where has the time gone? She would try to find the next version of herself. Woman in the city. Woman being careful. Woman in a long dark coat, one of those third-hand wool ones with deep pockets you could get in the Village for forty bucks. Big enough to hide in. She'd pet dogs. She'd buy a broom! Sweep her floor. Sweep her floor over and over. Maybe she'd get a place where she could paint the floorboards. A rose or light green, perhaps. Then one table. A simple oak table. A small one, with a chair. She'd buy a nice bra when she could afford it. A pretty one. So many things to think about. She'd get a cat, she'd buy good lipstick, she'd disagree with the op-ed pages. She'd marry a millionaire. Ha. She'd light a candle, watch the flame. She would watch her ass, too. Not talk to too many people. Not tell them much. Maybe cut her hair, buy some sunglasses. She had to assume that Tony Verducci's people would be looking for her. Watching to see what she did. She would find a place and tell the landlord she had to have good heat. The prison was so cold, the walls started getting icy in December; half the women caught pneumonia each winter, coughing and spitting up gunk in the bathrooms, especially the women with AIDS. What else? Well, there was wine. She'd sit somewhere and just sip it and let it hit her head. Nothing to drink for four years. That first glass, maybe with a piece of lamb or chicken. Could you drink red wine with chicken? She didn't remember. It didn't matter. To be drunk, that was the thing. And some good coffee. Not too much, just a couple of cups, to help her think. Cigarettes, too. As many as she wanted. But no more than five a day. She'd go to the Strand bookstore and look at the old titles. Peruse the history section. She used to do that, she used to feel safe doing that. She was going to find the latest biography of Charles Dickens. She was going to get a little shit job and survive on nothing. Lay low, live well. She was going to buy only good stuff and put it in the refrigerator. Vegetables and fruit and skim milk. Good bread. Maybe a little cheese. Fresh carrots. Grapefruit. She had missed onions and decent Mexican food and hummus and garlic and Granny Smith apples and the smell of the dry cleaner's shop and the feeling of a newspaper that had never been read by anyone else and good shampoo and getting a smoked turkey sandwich at the deli and watching the limousines outside the Plaza Hotel and having her own telephone and real butter and the feeling of a man's big hand running lightly up and down her neck-yes, that, too. And the moment when he was fully inside of you, when you didn't have to think about anything. Anything but. And riding in elevators and watching the traffic light turn green and the ticking of a bicycle. So much she'd missed, so much to think about, including the things she didn't want to think about-the things that worried her, the worst one being why in God's name the Manhattan District Attorney's Office had decided to let her go. She was guilty, after all.