The words burbled up from my chest like sick. “Shut up,” I said. It was loud enough to make people look at me. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Linda’s mammy didn’t look. She stayed facing the judge.
“I always said I’d do my best for Chrissie,” she said. “I said it to my husband—‘We’ve got to do our best for this little girl, she’s not got much.’ It’s what we believe in, what God teaches us. I did do my best for a while. When she was little. I had her round, fed her, gave her some of Linda’s clothes. But then she got older. She got tougher. I stopped doing things for her, because I thought if I kept on doing things for her she’d keep on hanging around. I didn’t want her playing with Linda all the time. I didn’t want people thinking of them as a pair.”
She coughed a wet-sounding cough and wiped something off her cheek. “She did terrible things. She did. But she’s just a kid. She needed people like me to come through for her and I didn’t. I failed her. We all did. She’s just a little girl.”
She looked at me over her shoulder. It was like she couldn’t make her eyes stick. They drooped down to the floor underneath my glass box, and across to the bench where Steven’s mammy was sitting.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I put my hands over my face. I didn’t speak. I shouted.
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
I shouted and panted and stamped my feet on the floor of the box, one and then the other, like I was running or marching. The guards took hold of me under the arms and dragged me down the stairs, into a cell. They held me until I got too tired to kick and scream anymore. Then they left.
“We are best friends,” I whispered when I was by myself. “Me and Linda are best friends. And I didn’t need you. And Mam does care about me.”
Now, sitting at the table, Linda didn’t say anything for long enough that my cheeks boiled and my throat burned, and then she said, “Yeah. Best friends,” so quietly I only just heard it. But I did hear it. I swallowed it whole.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You should get some sleep,” she said. “You must be so tired.”
“Yeah. Probably,” I said. I didn’t want to stop talking. Over the years I had spent hours imagining the things I would say to her when we were reunited, and I hadn’t voiced even a fraction. It was the way it had been with Mam: these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head. I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.
“Are you going to go home tomorrow?” she asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know,” I said.
“Will they be looking for you?”
“Yeah. Molly has this court order. It means I have to do what they say. I can’t just take her away if I want to. They treat it like kidnap.”
“Okay.” If she was shocked, she managed to keep it out of her voice.
“I don’t know if we’ll go back tomorrow, though,” I said. “I was thinking maybe I should wait until they actually track us down. It might be days and days.”
“I think it might be better just to face it,” she said. “I think they’ll feel better about it if you go back and admit you made a mistake.”
“Maybe it would just be better if they took her.”
“Why?”
“Just seems right, doesn’t it? For me to lose her. It’s what I did to other people, so it’s what should happen to me.”
“Like—what—a tooth for a tooth?”
“Kind of.”
“It doesn’t work that way though, does it? They gave you a punishment for what you did. You went to prison for a long time. You can’t go on being punished and punished forever.”
“I didn’t go to prison. I went to a Home.”
“But it wasn’t an actual home. It’s not like it’s somewhere you would have chosen to be. You weren’t free.”
I ground my molars together until grit coated my tongue. It was hard to describe the freedoms I had missed when I was at Haverleigh—the scratchy spin of rolling down grass hills, the smell of birthday cake candles—and harder to admit that the losses had been so much smaller than the gains. Underneath the layers of guilt and complication, three things were true: that Haverleigh had given me what I needed; that there had been a price for my being there, and that I hadn’t been the one to pay it. It was where I would have chosen to be, and if I went back in time I would choose it again, over and over, and if it still existed it was where Molly and I would be at that moment, begging the keepers to take us in.
In court, one of the white wigs had said that the things I had done had lost me my childhood, and that that was punishment enough. He was right and wrong. I had lost something that spring—something light and precious—but without it I could still run around and climb trees and do handstands with my best friend. You couldn’t do that if you were dead. Now I was older, and I lived with such a heavy millstone around my neck I sometimes felt my spine would buckle beneath it, but from time to time I became so absorbed in Molly that I forgot who I was, and I shrugged off the weight to rest on the ground. You couldn’t do that if your kid was dead.
A high cry jolted
