“Where you gonna be after lunch, L-7?”
Noah shakes his head. He’s been back in A-Block for three weeks now, after spending over a month in the prison hospital and having multiple surgeries at Phelps Memorial, where he was kept under heavy security and cuffed at the ankles to his bed. Since returning to A-Block, Gallery L, cell number 7, he has only left his cell for required trips—the mess hall, classes, and the occasional psych visit. He doesn’t have a job, still not having regained a sufficient range of motion in his hands to do much of anything, and won’t go to the prison yard or the gym. So even though inmates are allowed out of their cells in the afternoon, after lunch, he has stayed within this cramped, dreary space, staring at the walls, for almost the entire day. He sleeps, he supposes, but in the zombie-like daze in which he finds himself, it’s hard to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, between dream and reality. His life has become a meaningless fog. There is no hope or despair, no fear or happiness.
“L-7?” It’s one of the “white shirts,” the senior correctional officers, joining the other CO. “You in pain, L-7? You know we have meds for you. All you have to do is tell us who did this to you.”
The warden cut off pain medication as soon as Noah was released from the prison hospital, trying to get Noah to implicate the Aryan Brotherhood in the attack. Everyone knows who attacked Noah, but they can’t prosecute them or even write up a disciplinary ticket without Noah’s cooperation.
Noah’s no snitch. He’d like nothing more than to stick it to Eric Wheaton and his buddies, but it’s just not in him to rat someone out. Growing up with his buddies, that was the one rule you didn’t break. You might bend the law or outright fracture it; you might fail to do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but you never snitched.
“That’s your choice, L-7.” The lieutenant and the other CO leave.
Time passes in slow motion. Noah goes to the mess hall for lunch but doesn’t touch his food; he’s lost almost twenty pounds since the attack.
Later in the afternoon, another CO shows up at his cell. “Mail, L-7,” he says, and he reaches through the bars and drops a single envelope into the small bucket reserved for such things. “Sorry for your troubles.”
He’s sorry? Noah looks up at the CO, who gives a grim shake of the head and moves down to the next cell. They read the inmates’ mail in Sing Sing, unless it bears the seal of an attorney-client communication, so the sorry must pertain to the mail he just received.
How, he thinks, could things possibly get worse?
Noah’s limbs are stiff when he gets up; he’s sat in the same position for almost three hours straight. He reaches into the bucket and grabs the envelope, perforated at the top by whoever read it. When he opens it, there is a Post-it that simply says Sorry and then a newspaper article, folded up. He unfolds it with a knot in his stomach and reads the headline: MANHATTAN SOCIALITE’S DROWNING RULED SUICIDE. Along with the article is a photo of Paige Sulzman in a sundress at some fancy gala.
“No!” he cries out. “No!” He forces himself to read a bit of the article, enough to know that Paige was found dead in her pool, before he grabs hold of the prison bars and shakes them. “No!” His bandaged hands start to bleed through the gauze and pads, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t even feel the pain. He screams until he has no voice, hundreds of other inmates hearing his cries and joining in with shouts and catcalls of their own.
Finally, exhausted, Noah crumples to the floor, leaning against the cell door. “Not her,” he whispers. “Not Paige.” She was supposed to move on. She was supposed to forget about him and get on with her life. She was supposed to leave John Sulzman and start the interior design business she’d always dreamed of having. She was supposed to have a life. She promised him. He made her promise she’d do that.
He cries, for the first time that he can remember. The tears pour out until he is gasping for air, coughing and gagging.
And then he has nothing left. He lies flat on his cell floor, oblivious to the dust, to the insect that crawls past his face. He stares into nothingness. He finds consolation in one and only one thing.
That the first chance he gets, he’ll see Paige again, this time in another world.
“L-7?” a CO calls out. “Everything okay?”
Noah raises his head, turns to the guard.
“Hey, CO,” he says. “I want to go into the yard.”
“There’s less than an hour left of yard time,” the CO replies.
But that’s okay. Noah won’t need longer than that.
42