She launches herself at me, lifting her shoulder and whipping the lock sock like a mace to bring down on my head. I stumble backward, my arms flying over my head.
I can feel Benny’s footfalls before I see her as she charges into the hall. She grabs Krystal by the wrists, flipping her easily onto the carpeted ground with a thunk.
Chapter 40
Krystal and I are given three days in solitary confinement, soft-walled cells on the lower level with a slat for food and a rimless toilet so there’s never any reason to leave. As they march me down, I protest that I’m blameless but it does no good. The heavy metal door has only one window that the guards can watch me through, but it stays closed most of the time.
The fluorescent ceiling lights give no indication of time passing. Girls go nuts in these cells, in the silence, the aloneness. The pull to replay moments from the past is impossible to resist. I keep thinking on a space of seconds after the verdict was read at my trial: my head bowed, sobbing, the courtroom disassembling into a teeming mess of jurors departing and journalists talking into voice recorders and mostly people just trying to get out of the stuffy wood-paneled room. And the part that makes the least sense, Philip Lancaster breaking every court precaution by stepping past the witness barrier and up to my table.
“Hrrrrre,” I heard him say in a muffled voice.
He stood above me, his ordinary eyes blinking down.
“Tkk de Klllnxx,” he said. Through his lips, I could see the wires that kept his jaws closed. I glanced down to the table where he nudged a box of Kleenex toward me.
I shook my head. “I can’t,” I said, holding up my stumps.
He nodded and dragged a tissue from the box. He bent over the table and reached his hand toward my tear-stained face. With the tissue, he brushed away the tears. Small strokes, like a painter.
“Bbbttrr?” he asked.
I nodded. “Better.”
I made a mistake, I wanted to say. I wouldn’t do it again, but before I could open my mouth, a police officer was leading me by the shoulder out of the courtroom to a waiting cop car.
I replay the scene again and again, the broken mashed-up face looming over me, the knowledge between the two of us that I’d done it. That act of kindness is still more unfathomable to me than any cruelty.
I sit in the middle of the padded cream-colored floor, rocking on my crossed legs. I can’t let this cell make me crazy. If I’ve learned anything, it’s how to be confined. I have to shake Philip out of my head. I have to go someplace else.
The only place to go is to Jude, to a night the autumn I turned seventeen, the autumn I lost my hands, before everything changed. By then, there was nothing between us but a mile of dim-lit forest and October cold that numbed our breath when we kissed. I’d told Jude everything by then. I’d told him about my fear of marriage, how I’d once walked in on my father and one of his wives in their cloister, his hair-covered back, the black soles of their feet pushed out the end of the blanket.
I’d told him how scared I was for my sister Constance, the way she commanded every eye in a room even though she was only twelve. How the men already whispered about what a fine wife she’d be, the way nobody’d ever whispered about me.
I’d told him how fiercely I dreamed of meeting God. How I imagined him, a boy our age, walking down a street in a city or plowing a field or going to school. He could look like anything. The only certain things were his name—Charlie—and his brilliant green eyes. Jude just nodded, kissed the bend between my thumb and forefinger.
One night that autumn, I sat on the porch outside the Prophet Hall, leaning back on my elbows. Inside, the Prophet had been preaching for hours and the Community breathed countless lungs’ worth of hot breath, until the place was suffocating and stifling and I had to step out. The night air was cool and smelled like browning leaves. Past the walls of trees, stars dotted the sky. My mind searched for a star with a greenish cast, one that might be a window to the place everybody goes when they die.
In the forest in front of me, two stars stared back. It took a moment to realize they were Jude’s eyes, reflected off the candlelight from the Prophet Hall.
I ran to the forest’s edge. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. My daddy’s been drinking,” he said worriedly.