Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER SIX





Lisa Fay woke in the harsh half-light that doubled for night in prison. They dimmed the lights on the cellblock after ten, but real dark was as distant a memory as the feel of rain on her face or grass under her bare feet. Was that grass at her feet? Lisa Fay jerked her knees close to her chest and scanned the room. Delfine’s bunk was empty. That would be Delfine, reaching out her spidery hand to stroke the sole of her foot. Delfine had nightmares; she woke up in the night convinced she was dead and had to lay a hand on something living to disprove the notion. “Quit it,” Lisa Fay muttered roughly. “Get away from me.”

Delfine’s voice was a trilling whisper from the foot of the bed. “If you saw what I just saw,” she said, “you wouldn’t be saying that.”

Lisa Fay gave a quick kick and Delfine backed off. She drifted in a slow circuit of the cell, wraithlike, and slipped beneath the blanket on her bed. Lisa Fay turned to face the wall. Dark, rain, grass—nothing was real here. She’d been fed fake so long she’d started to forget what real felt like. Even Delfine’s nightmares lacked substance. Lisa Fay had asked her, once. Nowhere, Delfine answered, a quick giggle churning the air. Nobody. Just dead as a doorknob, and made a sound like a ghost might make, or a short gust of wind forced into the eaves. Lisa Fay waited a few beats and then called softly, “You awake?”

“Ain’t no sense sleeping when they come for you in the night,” Delfine answered. Sense was the last thing Delfine could claim but she called on it anyway. Sense and mother Mary, baby Jesus, Saint Anthony when she lost something, Saint Francis to keep the mice at bay, Saint Peter–open-your-pearly-gates-and-let-this-poor-soul-free. She’d been saved at an early age by an old priest who relied heavily on the laying-on of hands to rescue Delfine from the fires of hell. Now Delfine laid her own hands on things that didn’t belong to her, hoarded them in a drawer until their rightful owners came to retrieve them. It was a miracle she survived the beatings that followed. “They aren’t coming for me,” Lisa Fay retorted, “they’re coming for you. Let me get some sleep.”

“You’re the one asking,” Delfine replied.

Delfine was damaged, with a brain that had buckled somewhere along the line and a crippled leg that dragged behind her like an afterthought. She had a fine spray of freckles across skin the color of weak tea, hair that sprang in tight curls from her scalp. Her mother was Creole. Her daddy—her daddy was Irish, Delfine’s mother claimed. Or Estonian. Or Icelandic. She was a connoisseur of geography, Delfine’s mama was, a collector of men from diverse corners of the earth. She told Delfine to keep an eye out for him and the girl did. Her left eye, the pale blue murky one that watered without relief. Her right eye—the one she called her good eye—was the stout gray-brown of swamp bark and saw things that weren’t there. She wasn’t clairvoyant; she was acquisitive. Saw things through that eye that she wanted to possess, saw them as real as though they were laying there before her, and she went hunting for them each day. Found them and stole them.

Like she’d steal my foot if it weren’t bound to the rest of me, Lisa Fay thought. Steal my eyelashes. Steal my thoughts. My worthless time. Ah, she thought, when she heard Delfine’s breathing even into a snuffling drone. Steal my sleep, too.

Delfine was right, of course. They were coming for Lisa Fay. Marching like a ragged column of soldiers across the landscape of her past. Her mother, silently ironing the wind ruffles out of lakes and oceans. Her father, blustery, callused, his hands thrust deep into soil that would disappoint him with every season’s yield. Jerry Skink, oh, and he could rot in hell for all the sympathy she’d extend to him. Arlyn? Lost at sea or land, lost to a seething city or a looping highway that never brought him home.

And herself. Young enough then to get caught up in it all, stupid enough now still to be waiting.

Lisa Fay lay in her bunk and let the memories slowly unfurl. Herself, not quite ten years before. Her father’s angry roar and how, that time, that was all. Right then. No more. And how she had turned on the doorstep—turned once to get a good look at the two-story, clapboard sided structure she had for twenty-one years called home—and turned again toward the future and made her way to the city.

And wasn’t she a rube, then, yeah! That girl who hovered at the back table at Spec’s and listened to the men play jazz, listened to them fill the room with their booming voices, the poetry of their sex. Lisa Fay had never heard a person use the word f*ck until she went to the city and then she heard it every day, casually, earnestly, in question and response, as part of people’s names, in the soft unanswerable exhalations of working women on the bus after a long day. She practiced using it herself on her solitary daylong perambulations through the streets. She was a rawboned kid, flatter-chested than she could forgive God for, and her hair frizzed when the fog rolled up Broadway and muscled the blue sky out of its path. Her skin was rough from working the dirt that nurtured her father’s garlic bulbs. She spent long intervals at the public sinks, trying to erase that stain from her hands.

And Arlyn. Oh, Arlyn. Arlyn “The Hook” Feyshon had an Old World face and hair that galloped in waves across his head. He wore the white cap and blue-and-white-striped ticking shirt of the longshoreman, his muscles bulging beneath it; he carried the trademark pair of gloves and grappling hook of the union brotherhood in the back pocket of his black Ben Davis jeans. He smelled of copra: coconut flesh and dusty vegetal hair and the musty hold of the ship where with twelve other stevedores he worked in hour shifts. He’d whispered details to her when she lay snug in the protection of his arms. Twenty minutes with a pick, hacking the dried, packed meat into manageable hunks. Twenty minutes with a shovel, pitching the pieces toward the vacuum that would blow it into the warehouse. Twenty minutes with a cigarette, leaning against a piling with the wind in his face and the best horn riffs from last night’s session drifting through his mind. And then he’d stretch and flick the fag end into the oily harbor water and lift the pick to start again, hour after hour until the whistle blew on the shift.

The Cargill plant ran without stopping. Arlyn and his mates shuffled off and a new crew came on to replace them and the coconut kept its steady journey toward the vats that stewed it down to its golden essence: no more rat, no more sea salt, just pure, slick, edible oil, ready to be bottled and shipped to every kitchen in America. The Hook cared about food. Every day shift at noon he sat on the pier with his legs dangling over the dirty water and he unwrapped his lunch. Six hard-boiled eggs and a key-open can of sardines, the heel from the loaf of bread he ate the night before, a pair of chocolate Ho Hos in their delicate foil wrapping, a warm Anchor Steam to wash it all down. He liked boiled turnips. He liked cabbage and cauliflower, potatoes mashed with plenty of butter, pickled herring in sour cream, and cherries. He liked the idea of exotic flavors but in practice stayed away from them. Spicy foods gave him gas and tropical fruits made him break out in a misery of hives.

Swing shift called for a different routine. He brought his horn and a fresh change of clothes so he could leave directly from work to catch the late set. Those days he started early in Red’s Java House on the waterfront and feasted on three, four, five of the foot-long wieners Red sold for a quarter apiece. He drank his joe and disagreed with the newspaper. He brought a ballpoint and scrawled poems on the back of Red’s napkins. He was in the middle of a blunt paean to seagulls and soft winds when someone—she told herself this story slowly, as he had told it, and her heart raced a little as it always did—the someone who was Lisa Fay approached his table.

“Hey, mister. You through with that paper?”

Arlyn looked up. “I’ve seen you before,” he said to the bony girl who stood so closely composed beside his booth.

She squinted at him. Then her eyes lit on the hardshell horn case resting on the bench beside him and she brightened with recognition. “You’re The Hook,” she said. “Aren’t you? You play at Spec’s.”

Arlyn reddened. “Not professional or nothing.” He peered down at the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “Sometimes they let me sit in.”

She nodded. Stood there an awkward minute longer. “So,” she said. “Can I have that paper?”

Arlyn stumbled over himself passing it to her. An uneaten hot dog lay on its paper plate beside his elbow. Arlyn watched her gaze flick toward the food and he nudged the plate closer to her. “Go ahead.”

Lisa Fay looked dubious. “Aren’t you going to eat it?”

“Please,” Arlyn said. He gestured to the other bench. “Have a seat.”

She lowered herself gingerly to the vinyl. She kept her gaze on the food. “It’s my birthday,” she said.

And with great formality and magnanimity and what could only be the most noble and generous of thoughts, The Hook said, “Happy birthday.”

Lisa Fay blinked in her bunk. What was the opposite of celebration? Today marked a bitter anniversary. Five years to the day since her catastrophe and she could remember the smell of the grass in the park as she lay there, her hands roughly cuffed behind her and her sobs unanswered. That grass was real, all right. The dirt under it was real. She had tried to stuff her mouth with it.

Five years ago, she had started the day a mother. By the end of the day she was not.

Lisa Fay sat up stiffly, careful not to wake Delfine. She eased her feet to the floor. It was a familiar routine, rising before her cellmate, before any of the others awoke. She felt under her bunk for the Bible and slid the Bic pen from the book’s cracked spine. Lisa Fay plucked the plastic plug from the rear of the pen, unclasped the safety pin she kept clipped to her tunic, and plunged the sharp end of the pin into the tube of ink.

The row of dots started on top of the big toe of her right foot, just before the nail. One dot. Two dots. Three dots, each composed of dozens of pinpricks saturated with ink, a tattoo to keep track of the time. On and on the dots wound, a row of refugees ejected from their homes and sent wandering. The line continued, each dot a rough quarter inch from its neighbor, across the sensitive skin on the top of her foot. Dipped beneath the anklebone, circled the ankle itself, and continued, a spiral, up her calf. It circled her knee. Made four revolutions about her thigh. Crossed her hip, circled her waist.

They made her body a calendar. The dot with a circle around it, that meant one month. A circle blackened with short rays that sprung from its perimeter—a symbol that looked like a bomb, exploding—that meant a year had passed. Lisa Fay had one of those on the ridge of her shin. Another behind her knee. A third on her creamy inside thigh. The last just below her hip.

And now, today, a fifth. Five years to the day since she’d touched his skin, watched his smile gape across his face.

The line of dots had arrived now at the stretch-marked skin of her belly. That was fitting, she thought. Five years. And here, where she’d held him. She wedged the ink tube upright with the pin in it into the narrow gap where the mattress met the bed frame, and then she opened the bible and lifted a photograph from its pages. It was the only precious thing Lisa Fay owned. A gift, of sorts. An exchange.

The boy in the photograph had the same slope to his cheek and his brow as her son. He was squatting on the hood of a broken-down car, raising a hand to something in the distance, his mouth shaped mid-speech, his body coiled as though ready to spring. The tail of a dog waved a blurry smudge through the corner of the shot. Sunlight struck a path through the photo, glinted off the car’s windshield, glowed on the boy’s tanned chest, caught in his shaggy mop of hair.

Wrecker, the woman had said, handing it to her across the table. He’s eight.

It sounded strange to hear her son’s name spoken by this stranger. I can have this?

It’s for you.

And Lisa Fay had hesitated. The photo from Belle had sustained her through these years. But she drew it from the pocket of her smock and slid the dog-eared square across the table. Will you give this to him? Willow? You’ll make sure he gets this?

There was a long pause. If you want me to, the woman said, I will.

Even so, Lisa Fay almost reached to snatch it back. She wasn’t sure how she could bear to be without it. Belle had come to the trial; she had sat through the sentencing; she had made the long trip by bus to visit Lisa Fay monthly in prison. Yolanda would have nothing to do with her friend once Jerry Skink weaseled his way between them, but Yolanda’s mother had not abandoned Lisa Fay. Belle had noted the delinquence that crept under her fingernails, the self-doubt that dulled her skin and jaundiced the clear white of her eyes, and she sought to challenge it out of the girl. She smuggled in chocolate cake and fed her grandiose ideas. When she got out of there, Belle insisted, she would hit the ground running. Fifteen years was fifteen years; if Caesar stole them that was plainly the fact of it, but to give him a second more of her time was a sin and a worse crime. No. She must study. Read. Learn to type. Teach herself some skill that had currency outside the clanging gates of prison, or when she got out she’d be no less vulnerable to the scoundrels and scammers who put her there in the first place.

But Belle would not speak to Lisa Fay of her son. It was as if the pain of losing the boy was doubled for her, first when Lisa Fay stopped bringing him to her flat to look after while she worked, then when he was whisked off by police to some other household. Let Wrecker have his own life, she counseled his mother, if she mentioned him at all. Let him survive. Lisa Fay could picture Belle. She could still see the way her lower lip trembled slightly when she added, else those tentacles you stretch out will bring you both down.

And then, on the third Saturday of the ninth month in Lisa Fay’s second year of incarceration, she waited for the summons that meant she had a visitor, and it never came. A month from that she waited again. Felt the gnaw of loss and worry, and the day passed. On the third month, when Lisa Fay was called to the visitors’ room, she found Yolanda, her eyes red-rimmed and her hands clutched in a nervous ball before her. Lisa Fay sank opposite her at the table. She looked at Yolanda and waited.

Mama Belle passed on, Yoli said.

Lisa Fay forgot to breathe. When she began again the air chased out of her lungs in a ragged huff. They sat together and let the fact settle between them.

In time, Lisa Fay said, Will you come again?

Yolanda turned away. I can’t come often, she said. The little ones.

But you’re here now.

I can’t stay. She pushed her chair back and stood up from the table. She shared her mother’s habit of canting her weight forward onto an elbow before pushing herself up to standing. Mama had a sweet spot for you, she said. Even after you did what you did.

Lisa Fay dropped her eyes. They did it to me.

Yolanda snorted. You did it to your own self, she said harshly. You did it to your son, who needed you. She let the accusation hang in the air and then she opened her purse. I found this in her special things. Seemed to me you should have it.

Lisa Fay glanced at the photograph and laid her trembling hand across it. She steadied her voice. And how are your boys? How is Ton-Ton?

Anton is in trouble all the time, Yolanda answered. The ghost of a familiar smile flitted across her face. He is an incorrigible child. Belle said he has the devil inside him.

He’s fine, then.

They’re all fine, yeah. She lifted her eyelashes and Lisa Fay saw the old Yolanda—the Yolanda who had been her friend—flicker briefly toward her. Belle said Wrecker’s fine, too, she said softly. Said she could just feel it.

My sister took him in.

Yes, Yolanda said. She stepped away from the table. Be strong, girl. She glanced at the guard and then back at Lisa Fay. I’ll see you when I see you.

Vaya con whatever.

Yeah. She laughed. You too.

And Yolanda had left, and Lisa Fay had sat for a while and stared at the photograph. She remembered the day Belle snapped it. She took out that little Brownie camera for special occasions. There was everything special about this day. It was her son’s third birthday. Lisa Fay and Wrecker sat side by side on Belle’s stoop, the sun falling over them. It was before Jerry Skink came into their lives. Her son’s face a little blurry and his mouth circled with ice cream. Chocolate ice cream, his favorite. His eyes said as much. His hair was a lion’s mane, an unruly mass that resisted her brush and sprang in all directions under the baseball cap she’d bought him. Hers was hardly neater. She wore a long skirt and a tank top that made her look fat. Blueberry ice cream cone in one hand and the other wrapped around her boy and a feeling in her heart she can call up still, and does. Every morning.

Sitting on her bunk now in the eerie half-light that passed for night at Chino, she gazed at her boy, alone, and older.

Be well, she whispered softly, and brought the photo gently, briefly, to her forehead.

She returned it to the Bible. Then she began to work on the mark. Five years. One thousand, five hundred, thirty-six days.

This one would scab before it would heal.

The lights banged on and the guard began his morning walk down the cell block, his stick clanging against the bars. Lisa Fay finished hastily and hid her gear. “Get up, Delfine,” she called to the wisp in the other bunk. “Time to rise and shine.”

It was pest control day. The rats and roaches had gotten out of hand and they were bombing them back to the Stone Age, the guards guffawed. That meant an extra hour in the yard for the inmates. A privilege, the warden called it. Before they returned to the block to breathe in the acrid fumes and sweep up the bodies of the fallen soldiers.

About time, Lisa Fay thought. She had to watch her back for guards and inmates and now she was sleeping with one eye open to make sure her bunk stayed clear of crawling things. They were everywhere. Just the day before she’d pulled work duty in the kitchen and was cutting thin pieces of processed ham on the meat slicer, paying attention to the sharp glide of the blade. “Bunkie?” A familiar voice giggled softly, and Lisa Fay’s heart sunk. She glanced around warily. Delfine risked seg just for being in the kitchen, and they’d both catch shit if anyone saw her sneak the skinny woman an extra lump of food. In one fluid motion Lisa Fay slapped a mound of sliced ham onto a sheet of butcher paper and held it behind her. “Take it and go,” she muttered roughly, and felt Delfine’s dry and wrinkled hands lift the parcel from her own.

Suddenly, eerily, Lisa Fay felt eyes on her. She jerked her head toward the sink. It wasn’t the matron, back from the pantry; it was a large, fat, fearless rat sitting on the drainboard, pinning her in its beady gaze. Without thinking, Lisa Fay reached for the two-pronged butcher’s fork beside her, balanced it in her hand, and flung it at him.

The fork rattled against the stainless steel backsplash and Lisa Fay darted toward it. A trace of blood smeared the sink board—she must have nicked him, at least—but the rat was gone.

The matron thundered in—“The hell was that?”—and though Lisa Fay explained, described the rat’s size, his audacity, the challenge he flung at her, standing there amid the drying pots and pans, the matron would not hear it.

“If there’s trouble, you call me,” she threatened. Lisa Fay breathed out. That meant Delfine had slipped away unseen. But the injured rat was on the loose, too.

With any luck they’d be nuking him now, Lisa Fay thought. She paced the back wall of the yard, ran her tongue across her teeth, picked up grit. It was a professional wind, here. No puny breeze ruffled the air at the women’s penitentiary. This wind gathered speed and the odor of steer manure from the feed lots south of the prison and swept up every variety of dust on its way before ripping through the yard. Lisa Fay faced into it as she headed west, turned her back to it as she returned. She stifled a hankering for a whiff of sweet air. City air, even, with its pungent neighborhood mix of coffee and cabbage and hot asphalt, all of it freshened by bay salt and bus exhaust, its edges softened by the rolling Caribbean lilt of ladies who sent money to their own children back home while they pushed strollers full of rich babies through the eucalyptus groves of Golden Gate Park.

Lisa Fay wondered what it smelled like, up there where Wrecker lived. Meg had been the bit of brightness she could count on to turn to. Meg, her champion and protector, her model and cautionary figure, eleven years older and gone gone gone. Took up with that quiet man, the timber faller from Tennessee who moved her clear to the top of the state before she’d passed her twentieth birthday. They’d married in a fever, Meg and Len; cleared out before the father ever knew what hit him, gave him a full year to calm down before they came back down to visit. Lisa Fay couldn’t help but shiver, remembering. They’d sat around the dinner table in a tense silence, their father so angry he could barely open his thin lips and cram the pot roast into his cheeks; he’d chewed rapidly, spitefully, swallowed too early and got the meat wedged in his windpipe. Len had motioned them aside. He pushed up the sleeves of his good shirt and squatted behind her daddy, hoisted him up to sitting, wrapped his arms around his belly and gave one sharp squeeze to his midsection that propelled that piece of meat halfway across the room. Daddy didn’t even bother to thank Len. He lit into Momma, let loose a string of curses—trying to kill him, was she?—and Lisa Fay had huddled next to Meg and prayed she’d take her with them when she left. We’ll visit again, Meg had whispered, but they hadn’t. She’d sent a real letter once with photographs of a little house and big trees and a pet goose who stalked the yard. She sent Christmas cards for a few years. And then even those fell off.

Now her boy was there. The lawyer fellow had told her that, at least. Came to court smelling of whiskey, a rumpled shirt and a stain on the knee of his trousers, and bungled her case so badly the judge had wondered—aloud!—whether he had truly passed the bar or had just wandered in off the street. He had a ratlike face and a loose thread that dangled from the side seam of his suit jacket. Lisa Fay pinned her attention to the single charcoal thread that threatened to unravel the man, reduce him to a tangle of threads too haphazard to ever find their way back to whole cloth. And with them her chances.

And so they had. The judge was a short, dark-haired older lady who didn’t have much regard for a mother who would endanger her own child by exposing him not just to drugs but to guns and to a morally compromised—she caught Lisa Fay’s eye as if to say you know exactly what I mean—living situation. No, some cases had to be taken on their own merits. This defendant, found guilty of aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a police officer, guilty of possessing a concealed weapon, guilty of accessory to unlawful distribution of controlled substances, was likewise guilty of child neglect. She was unfit to mother her child, who would remain in the custody of the state until a suitable home could be found for him. And the defendant was hereby remanded to the care of the criminal justice system for a period of thirty years. Eligible for parole—she added this as an afterthought—eligible for parole in fifteen years. Young lady, she’d said sternly, we take none of this lightly.

In the prison yard, Lisa Fay’s pace slowed nearly to a crawl. She caught herself and forced herself forward, made her wooden legs march at a brisk, defiant rate. She’d served five years. Five years done. Ten to go—ten only, if she kept her head down, showed none of the pain, groveled at their feet—ten if they kept their word, that is. All of the power rested with them. Ten only. Ten still? Was it possible that she could last through that? Was there skin enough on her body to sustain?

The lawyer had visited her in jail when she’d been there a year. She almost refused to see him but held just a glimmer of hope, the faintest thought that maybe the judge had changed her mind, was ready to set her free.

He wore casual clothes this time, a pair of khaki pants and a buttoned shirt with no tie, and his hair flopped over his collar. He’d decided to leave the law, he told her. He’d never had a real calling. He’d entered to please his parents and now his parents had abandoned their faith in the status quo and bought a sailboat and were on their way to Polynesia, and he—well, he’d always harbored a wish to paint.

Lisa Fay stared at him, dumbfounded. Had he come this far to tell her this?

I thought you might want to know, he said. He looked around guiltily. He had the face of a rat, long and sharp, but none of a rat’s cunning or resourcefulness. Lisa Fay wondered how he could function in the world. I’m not supposed to tell you this, he warned. Once the courts terminate your parental rights you’re not entitled to any information about your child’s whereabouts. The lawyer shrugged. I’ve been disbarred, he said. So what can they do to me? He tipped forward, leaned close to her ear, put his ratlike lips to it. He’s been adopted up to Humboldt County, he whispered. Your sister and her husband. Then he sank back into his chair and watched her. Hey, you’re a nice kid, he said. Look me up when you get out of this joint. And he slunk his way out of the folding chair and shambled across the ugly tiles to the door.

And just last month that woman, Willow, there to tell her Meg’s mind was harmed, her parents dead, her son in someone else’s charge.

The question trembled on her lips but went unasked. Does he recall—

She had sent her boy the photograph. It was all she could think to do.

Lisa Fay pulled up short at the end of the yard. She lifted her hands to her hips and waited for her heart to still.

One hundred laps, forward and back. The wind had slowed to a dawdle and the other women clustered in casual groups, talking, laughing, complaining, harassing one another, braiding hair, dozing in the sun. She caught a glimpse of Delfine lurking behind a trashcan chained to its stand, trying to pass unnoticed. A group of women had clearly noticed her. Others parted to the side as they advanced.

The Mountain had been looking for Delfine. Now that she had her in her sights, she could afford to take her time. The Mountain—aptly named, Lisa Fay thought, with her small peaked head and that solid hunk of a body so broad it required custom clothes—turned her back to Delfine and said something to Pearlie and Little Red that made them laugh. Even if it weren’t funny, those two would laugh on cue. The Mountain could tell them to drop their drawers and piss in the middle of a crowd and they would do it. But when they sang, the three of them, it could quiet the whole yard. It brought tears to the warden’s eye, and the guards had been instructed to overlook The Mountain’s occasional, minor infractions of the rules. Delfine had not the slightest chance of escape.

Delfine caught her eye before Lisa Fay could look away, and the scrap of a woman scurried across the yard toward her.

Lisa Fay groaned. “What have you done, now.”

“What!” Delfine said, and gave a small, happy squeal.

Lisa Fay looked closer. There was gray in Delfine’s hair. She had never noticed that before. How old could she be, this woman who behaved like a backward child? “Delfine,” she warned. “Don’t mix me up in this.”

“In nothing,” Delfine scoffed. “Miss Mountain!” she chirped, as the group came close. She curtsied.

The Mountain surveyed her blandly, without prejudice, as though she were considering an unexceptional piece of furniture. But when she turned her gaze to Lisa Fay her eyes were backed by malice. “I believe,” she said slowly, “you have something of mine.”

Lisa Fay took an involuntary step back. She glanced warily at the three of them. Then her eyes glazed softly and she gazed past them toward a bird who sat perched on the ugly wire atop the yard wall. A mockingbird, was it? It opened its mouth and let a complicated stream of nonsense flow. There were mockingbirds in her father’s yard in Watsonville, good-sized birds who could snatch a song out of the air and run with it, riff on a melody like a man with a saxophone. Her boy had that in his blood, too. Not just the backyard in Watsonville but the music that motivated Arlyn to pick up his horn and flesh out a tender melody. He had it all, everything she could remember, everything that had happened to her up to his birth, everything Arlyn had given him, all of it running unheard beneath the steady pumping whoosh of his blood as he grew, unaware.

What she would give to see her child.

She turned back to The Mountain. Here’s what she would give: her preference. Until she was released to see him, she would not care what happened to her. She would not let it spawn a reaction, anything the parole board could latch on to as evidence of flawed remorse. She would offer no resistance to their program—their shitty, abominable program of systematic degradation—and they would have no choice but to set her free. That’s all she sought. Earlier, rather than later. Early enough to have some time with her son before he was grown. Lisa Fay sighed. She dropped her shoulders. She said, “No. I don’t believe I do.” And as she watched the dark pupils widen in The Mountain’s eyes, she thought, Go ahead and kill me. I’ll be out of here that much faster.

The Mountain slowly advanced upon her.

“Hey hey hey hey hey!” Delfine aspirated. “This one? She don’t give a flying fork what you believe!” And she insinuated her scrawny little edge-bitten body into the group until she stood just inches from The Mountain. She squared her flimsy shoulders and puffed her little chest.

“Uh,” The Mountain said, a volcanic rumble.

There was a long moment of held breath. No one stood up to The Mountain. She had the power to crush anything in her path. She was large and solid and fatally smart and relentless in her need to subordinate others. She leaned forward slowly, incrementally, toward Delfine. She leaned, Lisa Fay thought stupidly, like an ox that had been bludgeoned but whose bulk has not fully registered the blow. “A flying fork?”

“Yeah,” Delfine whispered. “That too.”

Lisa Fay shut her eyes. The rumble grew. Little Red and Pearlie chimed in with tentative laughter.

Lisa Fay forced herself to look. The Mountain had bent forward far enough to clap her mighty paws around Delfine. She was squeezing her. Delfine was almost absorbed into the bulk of The Mountain’s voluminous breast. And then The Mountain opened her arms and Delfine popped free. The Mountain held something in her hand. She opened her mouth and situated her custom bridgework snug against her gums.

“Me neither,” The Mountain rumbled. Laughter was a seismic event. “Do you, Little Red? Do you, Pearlie?”

No, they answered in tandem, they didn’t give a flying fork either.

Psycho. Freak show. Delfine, you crazy bitch, Lisa Fay thought. You stole her teeth?

She would smuggle Delfine more food tomorrow. She would let her use the toilet first.

But the foot? Not in a million years, Lisa Fay thought. Never again would she let Delfine touch any part of her body, attached or not.