Don paced. He wondered, darkly, if the whole campaign against him might even be Coates’s way of expressing a kind of fucked-up jealous love for him. He’d seen that movie with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. It had scared the living shit out of him. A scorned woman would go to any length to fuck you over and that was a fact.
His consideration briefly flickered to his mother, and how she had confessed to telling Don’s ex, Gloria, not to marry him, because “Donnie, I know how you are with girls.” The hurt of that went all the way to the bone, for Don Peters loved his mother, had loved her cool hand on his feverish forehead when he was a little boy, and remembered how she used to sing that he was her sunshine, her only sunshine, and how could your own mother turn on you? What did that say about her? Talk about controlling females, there it was in a nutshell.
(It occurred to him that he ought to call and check on his mother, but then he thought, forget it. She was a big girl.)
The current situation stank of female conspiracy: seduction and entrapment. That the loony in Unit 10 had somehow known the warden would be calling him in pretty much sealed the deal. He wouldn’t say they were all in it together, no, he wouldn’t go that far (it would be crazy), but he wouldn’t say they weren’t, either.
He sat on the edge of the warden’s desk and accidentally jarred a small leather bag off the edge, onto the floor.
Don bent to pick the bag up. It looked like what you might use to put your toothbrush in if you were traveling, but it was nice leather. He unzipped it. Inside the bag was a bottle of dark red nail polish (like that was going to distract anyone from noticing that Coates was a hideous witch), a pair of tweezers, a pair of nail clippers, a small comb, a few unopened tabs of Prilosec, and . . . a prescription pill bottle.
Don read the label: Janice Coates, Xanax, 10 mg.
2
“Jeanette! You believe this?”
It was Angel Fitzroy, and the question made Jeanette clench up inside. Was what true? That Peters had taken her into the corner by the Coke machine and made her beat him off? Her headache wasn’t just a headache anymore; it was a series of explosions, bang-bang-bang.
But no, that wasn’t what Angel was talking about. Couldn’t be. Ree would never tell anyone, Jeanette tried to comfort herself, her thoughts like shouts inside her skull, yet barely discernible over the detonations set off by her migraine. Then she guessed—hoped—what Angel was talking about.
“You mean—the sleep thing?”
Angel stood in the doorframe of the cell. Jeanette was on her bunk. Ree was off somewhere. The floor of the wing was open in the late afternoon, everyone on Good Report free to roam.
“Yeah, course that’s what I mean.” Angel slid smoothly into the cell, pulled up the single chair. “You can’t sleep. None of us can. Won’t be too much of a problem for me, because I don’t sleep much, anyway. Never did, not even as a kid. Sleepin’s like bein dead.”
The news of Aurora had struck Jeanette as preposterous. Women cocooned in their sleep? Had the migraine ruined her mind somehow? She wanted to take a shower, but she didn’t want to talk to a guard. They wouldn’t let her, anyway. A prison had rules. The guards—oh excuse me, the officers—were the rules incarnate. You had to do what they said or bingo, Bad Report.
“My head really hurts, Angel. I have a migraine. I can’t handle the crazy.”
Angel inhaled, deeply and loudly, through her long, bony nose. “Listen, sis—”
“I’m not your sister, Angel.” Jeanette was in too much pain to worry about how Angel would take a rebuke.
But Angel just rolled right along. “This thing’s crazy but it’s real. I just seen Nell and Celia. What’s left of em, anyway. They went to sleep and now they wrapped up like fuckin Christmas presents. Someone said McDavid’s got it, too. Gone baby gone. I watched it grow on Nell and Celia. The stuff. It crawls right up. Covers up their faces. It’s like a fuckin science experiment.”
Crawls right up. Covers up their faces.
So it was true. You could tell by the way Angel said it. Well, why not. It didn’t matter to Jeanette. There was nothing she could do about it, or anything else. She closed her eyes, but a hand fell on her shoulder and Angel began to shake her.
“What?”
“You goin to sleep?”
“Not while you’re asking me questions and shaking me like I was popcorn. Quit it.”
The hand lifted away. “Don’t go to sleep. I need your help.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re all right. You ain’t like most of the rest of em. You got a head on your shoulders. You’re as cool as a fool in a swimmin pool. Aren’t you even gonna let me tell you?”
“I don’t care.”
Although Angel didn’t respond immediately, Jeanette felt her looming over the side of the bed.
“That your boy?”
Jeanette opened her eyes. Angel was peering at the photograph of Bobby fixed on the painted square on the wall beside her bunk. In the photo Bobby was drinking from a straw out of a paper cup and wearing a cap with Mickey ears. His expression was adorably suspicious, like he thought maybe somebody was going to try to snatch his drink and his hat and make a break for it. It was from when he was little, four or five.
“Yeah,” said Jeanette.
“Cool hat. Always wanted one a them. Jealous of the kids that had em. Photo looks pretty old. How old’s he now?”
“Twelve.”
It must have been about a year before the bottom completely fell out, when she and Damian took Bobby to Disney World. The boy in the photograph didn’t know that his father was going to punch his mother one time too many and that his mother was going to bury a clutchhead screwdriver in his father’s thigh and that his aunt was going to become his guardian while his mother did her time for second-degree murder. The boy in the photograph just knew that his Pepsi tasted great and his Mickey hat was cool.
“What’s his name?”
While she thought of her son, the explosions in Jeanette’s head receded. “Bobby.”
“Nice name. You like that? Bein a mom?” The question slipped out without Angel knowing she meant to ask it. A mom. Being a mom. The idea made her heart stutter. She didn’t let it show, though. Angel had her secrets, and she kept them close.
“Never been much good at it,” said Jeanette and forced herself to sit up. “But I love my son. So what is it, Angel? What do you need me to do?”
3