He said, “You mean the fire? No, I did the fire.” Always the literalist.
I coughed. “I’m covering for you. Now go home. That’s an order. If you’re my friend, you’ll do it.”
“I don’t care who knows,” he said.
I took a breath. “You and I are magicians,” I said. “Magicians keep secrets. Now be a magician and keep your fucking mouth shut.” I tried to smile, but it was a mistake, and I think I scared him. “I’m counting on you, Cool Calvin. Now go. And leave the gas can here.”
He went.
As people across the way came out of their apartments, I was crouched down, Harley’s arm around me, and I was telling her about the lawyer’s business card in my wallet. “No one else,” I told her. “Only him.”
A siren grew louder, and then a patrol car pulled up to the curb across the street. The siren turned off but others blared in the distance. My door was still open and the birds were cooing.
“You’ll watch my doves?” I asked.
“Of course,” Harley said.
A woman in a police officer’s uniform was coming across the lawn, making shoe prints in the fresh snow. “Is anyone in that car?” she called out.
The distant sirens were becoming louder.
“No!” Harley replied. “But she’s hurt really bad.”
Before it went dark, I noticed everything: the streetlights and the smoke and the bright fire and the snow on the rooftops across the way.
It was pretty.
The officer approached us. “What happened?”
6
Until recently, I always thought mourning doves were morning doves. Certainly my own doves always began their call at sunrise. Once I learned the truth, I chose to disregard it. A dove’s call is hardly one of grief. It’s a wakeful, hopeful sound. It’s the call of being alive, the call of camaraderie.
I couldn’t see this particular dove in the branches overhead, but hearing it soothed me. I temporarily lacked its freedom and was glad to be the beneficiary of its call. Several times recently in the yard I’d seen cardinals land on branches, heard woodpeckers knocking against trees, watched geese pumping their way through the sky in vast V’s, returning from their tropical vacation.
Such was the pastoral setting of the outdoor visiting area at the North Ridge State Correctional Facility. Inside the fence there was plenty of green lawn, and the trees this time of year were either in bloom or growing new leaves. The trees were tall but not wide. They were young, younger than the prison, and I liked knowing that people had been thoughtful enough to plant them for our pleasure.
In the center of the visiting area was a cement slab with rows of metal picnic tables and benches. Too many rows. Whoever planned out this spot had been overly optimistic about the menfolk coming to see their incarcerated women. I’d met too many inmates these past four months who never received a single visitor. It was a shame. Once the initial terror fades, prison is endlessly repetitive. Just knowing a visitor is coming can liven up an entire week.
I was waiting at a table all to myself. Besides breaking up the boredom, visitors gave me the chance to come out here, where there was a fine view of the rolling hills of Warren County, and where on a spring day like this, with the sky a deep blue and with only a few fair weather clouds and a soft breeze and the birds cooing and chirping, I could feel as if I were deep in nature. I could unfocus my eyes and make the fences and the razor wire and the guard towers disappear. I could temporarily rid my mind of the constant standing counts, the three a.m. sobbing that echoed down the cellblock, and the musty laundry room where I earned my nineteen cents an hour.
During my second month here my mother came to visit, bewildered Chip in tow. Jack Clarion came last month. They asked me, quite reasonably, why on earth I’d set someone’s car on fire. I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Because the teenager who saved my life didn’t deserve juvie.” Lacking a reasonable answer, I shrugged and said nothing, same as when the officers at my hospital bedside, and later at the police station, had asked me repeatedly and with increased tightening of the jaw to please just tell them what I knew.
I thought Brock McKnight performed well, given my refusal to elaborate on anything—no details, no motive, not a word about how I’d obtained my injury. He got the D.A. to reduce my charge from second- to third-degree arson. The D.A. probably figured I was covering for someone, but no one had been hurt in the fire, and here was an opportunity to close a case quickly.
At sentencing, a jowly man with a bald head and a “Judges Rule!” coffee mug sentenced me to two and a half years, with a chance of parole in 304 days. For handling my case, Brock charged me $1,800 plus the secret to the Four Queens trick. I thought it was a fair price.
And now on this pretty May afternoon my visitor was being escorted toward me by Simon, one of the kinder male guards. If I hadn’t known she was coming, I might not have recognized her: hair shaved down to a buzz, no makeup, denim jacket, skin-tight jeans. Even her gait was unfamiliar, a cautious creeping that looked almost reptilian. When it came to Ellen, I had long since given up trying to construe what was real and what was an act. But she appeared pinched and angular and jittery, like an addict, and I found myself believing the desperation.
When she got near, she did what everyone did at first. Glanced at my hand, then away.
“I never knew they’d do
