He flicked a switch, and the light blinked on. It was made of opaque, yellowed plastic in the shape of a rainbow. In the darkness, the light was brighter than any star out the window. It kept me awake every night, though I didn’t sleep anyway, just stared at the smeared multicolor half-circle projected on the wall that had probably lit the rooms of thousands of children in the pediatric ward over the past twenty years.
The night before the final day of my trial, I pried open the hospital window and stared out. Even with the glass pushed aside, the night-light blurred out the stars. I sunk to my knees and shuffled to where the night-light was plugged into the wall. Carefully, I closed my mouth over the top of the rainbow, breathing in the hot plastic smell. I shut my eyes from the brightness, the inside of my eyelids turning rosy, and pulled till the light came unstuck from the wall.
The rainbow was hot in my mouth. It tasted like a toy I had when I was little, a plastic palm-sized fish my father got me for my fourth birthday. He told me it was a minnow, though it was larger than a real minnow. Prettier. Brighter eyes.
I carried the night-light to the window and opened my mouth, watching it fall through the green light of traffic signals. The sound it made as it collided with the pavement was almost disappointing. A clatter. Barely an indication it existed at all.
With the light gone, I could see now. Below was a parking lot edged by a clutch of maples and the road that led first to the river, then to houses whose stones must have been stolen from the mountains. Farther out lay those mountains. And beyond them, stars. Whole galaxies of them hanging like a mobile above the pines where I spent my childhood. I had lived beside those trees for twelve years. But, from here, I could make out only a general sense of green. I found I didn’t care about them. If I hadn’t had my eyes trained on them, they might’ve only been a starless piece of sky.
Chapter 34
Dr. Wilson hasn’t been seen in Cell Block 3 of the female juvenile detention unit in the Missoula Correctional Department’s finest yellow-brick, piss-smelling facility for two weeks. I can see now I’d begun to enjoy his visits, the way he’s so different from everyone inside, not just because he dresses in real clothes and smells nothing like bleach, but because he is always, always calm. In jail, at any moment, you’re never farther than ten feet from someone completely losing their shit. He’s left me to deal with this place all on my own. I am certain he is never coming back.
With Dr. Wilson gone, there is no diversion from the everyday tedium of this place. Each day is the same routine, the same hallways, the same meals. The same drumming thoughts. I think about the regular people I saw from my window at the hospital, walking through hip-height snow berms, their faces obscured by scarves, but their eyes bright and unafraid. Always unafraid. I wondered how they could afford such bravery. Didn’t they peep out of their real glass windows at the hills circling them like baited wolves and squirm in their houses at night?
How could I ever be unafraid like them?
Beyond this jail is the city I dreamed about. I can sense it, even through these concrete walls. Why, now, is it so much less fascinating than I always imagined? Somewhere, I chant to the inside of my skull, is an old man swinging loaves of bread. And the woman in a coral-colored blouse taking a bus to work. I loved that woman, dreamed of being just like her, getting a job tapping on the keys of some big, gray computer keyboard in an office like the one my mother worked in once. Except computers don’t look like they did in my daydreams anymore, and even from far away the gasket sound city buses make terrifies me. The world is nothing like I imagined.
? ? ?
Angel returns to the cell at the end of the day with new worksheets shoved loose in her binder, which she drops unceremoniously on the floor before grabbing her book and climbing to her bunk. She stops and peers down at me.
“Why do you look like such a mope?” she asks.
“Dr. Wilson’s gone,” I say. “He hasn’t come by for weeks.”
“Good girl,” she says. “Maybe he’s gone for good.”
An unexpected pang stabs my chest. “He can’t be,” I say. “My parole meeting comes up in August, when I turn eighteen. If I’m going to get out, I need him to recommend me.”
“You don’t seriously think you’ll get parole,” she says.
I look up at her. “What?”
“I’m just being realistic,” she says, and I try to see it through her eyes—I almost killed Philip. What could I ever say to convince the board? To convince anyone?
“Have you been up for parole?” I ask.
“Once.”
“What’s it like?”
“Boring. They talk for like five hours before they even hear your case, and by the time you get to sit in front of them, they already know everything about you. They ask you a couple questions, and you get this idea that your answers actually matter, but they don’t. And then they roundtable, and they tell you parole has been denied.”
“What if a staff member stands up for you?”