Calloway laughed. 'It won't happen.'
'The bird.'
'I'm not giving you Batman-'
'Then I'm not giving you the brownie.' There was a beat of silence.
'Fine,' Calloway said. 'You win, you get the bird. But you're not going to win, because my bishop takes d3. Consider yourself officially screwed.'
'Queen to h7,' Shay replied. 'Checkmate.'
'What?' Calloway cried. I scrutinized the mental chessboard I'd been tracking-Shay's queen had come out of nowhere, screened by his knight.
There was nowhere left for Calloway to go.
At that moment the door to I-tier opened, admitting a pair of officers in flak jackets and helmets. They marched to Calloway's cell and brought him onto the catwalk, securing his handcuffs to a metal railing along the far wall.
There was nothing worse than having your cell searched. In here, all we had were our belongings, and having them pored over was a gross invasion of privacy. Not to mention the fact that when it happened, you had an excellent chance of losing your best stash, be that drugs or hooch or chocolate or art supplies or the stinger rigged from paper clips to heat up your instant coffee.
They came in with flashlights and long-handled mirrors and worked systematically. They'd check the seams of the walls, the vents, the plumbing.
They'd roll deodorant sticks all the way out to make sure nothing was hidden underneath. They'd shake containers of powder to hear what might be inside. They'd sniff shampoo bottles, open envelopes, and take out the letters inside. They'd rip off your bedsheets and run their hands over the mattresses, looking for tears or ripped seams.
Meanwhile, you were forced to watch.
I could not see what was going on in Calloway's cell, but I had a pretty good idea based on his reactions. He rolled his eyes as his blanket was checked for unraveled threads; his jaw tensed when a postage stamp was peeled off an envelope, revealing the black tar heroin underneath. But when his bookshelf was inspected, Calloway flinched. I looked for the small bulge in his breast pocket that would have been the bird and realized that
Batman the Robin was somewhere inside that cell.
One of the officers held up the copy of The Stand. The pages were riffled, the spine snapped, the book tossed against the cell wall. 'What's this?' an officer asked, focusing not on the bird that had been whipped across the cell but on the baby-blue tissues that fluttered down over his boots.
'Nothing,' Calloway said, but the officer wasn't about to take his word for it. He picked through the tissues, and when he didn't find anything, he confiscated the book with its carved hidey-hole.
Whitaker said something about a write-up, but Calloway wasn't listening.
I could not remember ever seeing him quite so unraveled. As soon as he was released back into his cell, he ran to the rear corner where the bird had been flung.
The sound that Calloway Reece made was primordial; but then maybe that was always the case when a grown man with no heart started to cry.
There was a crash, and a sickening crunch. A whirlwind of destruction as Calloway fought back against what couldn't be fixed. Finally spent, Calloway sank down to the floor of his cell, cradling the dead bird. 'Motherfucker.
Mother fucker.'
'Reece,' Shay interrupted, 'I want my prize.'
My head snapped around. Surely Shay wasn't stupid enough to antagonize
Calloway.
'What?' Calloway breathed. 'What did you say?'
'My prize. I won the chess game.'
'Not now,' I hissed.
'Yes, now,' Shay said. 'A deal's a deal.'
In here, you were only as good as your word, and Calloway-with his
Aryan Brotherhood sensibilities-would have known that better than anyone else. 'You better make sure you're always behind those bars,' Calloway vowed, 'because the next time I get the chance, I'm going to mess you up so bad your own mama wouldn't know you.' But even as he threatened
Shay, Calloway gently wrapped the dead bird in a tissue and attached the small, slight bundle to the end of his fishing line.
When the robin reached me, I drew it under the three-inch gap beneath the door of my cell. It still looked half cooked, its closed eye translucent blue. One wing was bent at a severe backward angle; its neck lolled sideways.
Shay sent out his own line of string, with a weight made of a regulation comb on one end. I saw his hands gently slide the robin, wrapped in tissue, into his cell. The lights on the catwalk flickered.
I've often imagined what happened next. With an artist's eye, I like to picture Shay sitting on his bunk, cupping his palms around the tiny bird. I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart. In the long run, though, it hardly matters how Shay did it. What matters is the result: that we all heard the piccolo trill of that robin; that Shay pushed the risen bird beneath his cell door onto the catwalk, where it hopped, like broken punctuation, toward Calloway's outstretched hand.
June
If you're a mother, you can look into the face of your grown child and see, instead, the one that peeked up at you from the folds of a baby blanket. You can watch your eleven-year-old daughter painting her nails with glitter polish and remember how she used to reach for you when she wanted to cross the street. You can hear the doctor say that the real danger is adolescence, because you don't know how the heart will respond to growth spurts-and you can pretend that's ages away.
'Best two out of three,' Claire said, and from the folds of her hospital johnny she raised her fist again.
I lifted my hand, too. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
'Paper.' Claire grinned. 'I win.'
'You totally do not,' I said. 'Hello? Scissors?'
'What I forgot to tell you is that it's raining, and the scissors got rusty, and so you slip the paper underneath them and carry them away.'
I laughed. Claire shifted slightly, careful not to dislodge all the tubes and the wires. 'Who'll feed Dudley?' she asked.
Dudley was our dog-a thirteen-year-old springer spaniel who, along with me, was one of the only pieces of continuity between
Claire and her late sister. Claire may never have met Elizabeth, but they had both grown up draping faux pearls around
Dudley's neck, dressing him up like the sibling they never had.
'Don't worry about Dudley,' I said. 'I'll call Mrs. Morrissey if I have to.'
Claire nodded and glanced at the clock. 'I thought they'd be back already.'
'I know, baby.'
'What do you think's taking so long?'
There were a hundred answers to that, but the one that floated to the top of my mind was that in some other hospital, two counties away, another mother had to say good-bye to her child so that
I would have a chance to keep mine.
The technical name for Claire's illness was pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy. It affected twelve million kids a year, and it meant that her heart cavity was enlarged and stretched, that her heart couldn't pump blood out efficiently. You couldn't fix it or reverse it; if you were lucky you could live with it. If you weren't, you died of congestive heart failure. In kids, 79 percent of the cases came from an unknown origin. There was a camp that
