Believe something.
The illustration is of a tree with a hundred black leaves. The veins of each leaf make up a spidery word: sky, cloud, rose, kiss.
There’s something else inside the envelope, an old photo that Shelby’s mom stuck in, the color faded, the edges upturned. It takes a moment before Shelby realizes she is the little girl in the picture. Her mother’s handwriting is on the back. Shelby at five. She’s wearing a sun hat and there’s a huge smile on her face. She is surrounded by stalks of dahlias, orange and yellow and pale red, with leaves so big you could write your life story on each one. She looks like a flower in the garden, just like her mother said.
When the phone rings at five a.m., Shelby is dreaming that she’s following Helene through a field. There are white and black butterflies rising from the tall grass. There are flowers the size of pie plates. Shelby is her current age, but Helene hasn’t aged. She’s seventeen and beautiful, and she runs so fast her feet don’t touch the ground. When Shelby pulls herself out of her dream to grasp the phone, Maravelle is on the other end of the line. Teddy’s been arrested. Shelby is awake in an instant, pulling on her clothes before Maravelle is through telling her the story. She still smells the grass in the field. She feels the sunlight on her skin, though it’s a gray, rainy dawn.
“Do you have an attorney?” Shelby asks Maravelle. “And not that old real estate lawyer you dated. Maybe we can get Teddy out tonight. They can’t just lock someone up without probable cause.”
“There’s cause. His whole crew has been arrested for home invasion. It was supposed to be a robbery but the couple was in bed, so they were tied up and terrorized. I think the old man had a stroke. Maybe he’s dead.”
Shelby sits on the edge of the bed, floored by this news. “Jesus, Mimi.”
“That damn Marcus was involved. Teddy swears he was just along for the ride and had nothing to do with the home invasion. He wasn’t identified in the lineup by the victim’s wife. But he was in the car when the police pulled them over.”
“I’m sure he had nothing to do with it,” Shelby is quick to say.
“Don’t defend him! That’s what I’ve been doing and look where it got us! The robbery happened because they’re all on drugs, Teddy included. I don’t want him getting out unless he’s going to rehab. He’d just go back to the same crowd.” Shelby can hear that Maravelle is crying.
“It will get better,” Shelby tells her. “Look at me. I was in a mental hospital drugged out of my mind. I sat in the basement for two years and did absolutely nothing but get high.”
“Tell me he’ll be fine, like you are.”
“He will be.”
That’s what Shelby says, but you can never be too sure. All week she researches possible placements to present to the court. She finds a therapeutic high school near Albany with a great reputation for turning kids around. Teddy’s attorney likes the looks of it, but the assignment has to be approved by the judge at Teddy’s hearing. That means the judge has to see something in Teddy, a soul worth saving; otherwise Teddy will stay in the detention center where he’s currently being held. There’s a three-week wait for a court date due to a jammed docket, so Teddy stays where he is, with every other underage offender in Nassau County. Nothing good can come of this. It’s a step deeper into a criminal life. He tells his mother not to come visit him. He doesn’t want anyone to see him caged up and humiliated.
On the day of the hearing Shelby waits in the hallway of the courthouse in Mineola with Jasmine and Dorian. Teddy’s attorney says it’s best to have only Maravelle and Mrs. Diaz sit in at the hearing. All the same, Shelby and Jasmine and Dorian are dressed for a serious occasion, wearing clothes they wouldn’t be caught dead in anywhere else. Shelby has on a black skirt and a white buttoned-up shirt she found at a thrift store on Twenty-Third Street. Jasmine’s borrowed one of her mom’s sweater sets, a pale, dignified gray, and a pleated navy-blue skirt. With her hair in braids, she looks like the serious schoolgirl she’s become. Dorian, the most somber among them, is wearing a suit and tie. Dorian looks so concerned that every time Shelby glances at him her heart breaks. She’s brought along the brochure for the school Teddy will be attending if the judge okays it so Dorian can see that it looks more like a college than a jail. A plain community college with brick dormitories, nothing fancy, but nothing horrendous. It’s not what anyone would have wished for Teddy, but it’s the road he’s taken, and it’s the road back.
“I was much worse than he is,” Shelby tells Jasmine and herself as they sit on the bench. A woman turns to glare at her. Everything you say in the courthouse echoes, even a whisper. “Well I was!” Shelby says.