I got to visit her at least, when she was in jail here in Atlanta. After her case settled, she was transferred to a women’s prison in south Georgia. Her lawyer and my guardian ad litem worked it out so she could call me—we lucked into a family-friendly judge—but I can no longer read her face, her body language, look into her eyes. It’s so much harder now to know how much she’s lying.
“Are you safe?” I asked, on our first call after she moved.
“Of course! Don’t you worry, baby. I already got myself a prison boyfriend. Rhonda.” She said it light, like she was being funny, but she wasn’t being funny. “Are you making any friends?”
“Not like that,” I said, but I told her about Joya, a sleepy-eyed eighth grader with a comforting whiff of pot smoke in her tang. She’s my friend even though she’s black. Most friendships here are set by race, which should put me on my own just like in Paulding. But Joya defaults to me because her mother is in court-mandated rehab. She and I belong to someone. The other two black girls in our cabin are on the adoption track. They belong only to the state and to each other.
Now, five phone calls later, Kai and I ask easier questions.
“Are you eating enough fruit?” she says.
“Yes,” I lie. “I’m eating lots of fruit.”
I have the receiver pressed so tight to my ear, it will be red and sore when we hang up. I am hungry for her voice, her laugh, her stories.
I sit cross-legged on the floor of the pantry, tucked between the stacks of paper goods and the shelves of potato flakes and canned soup. I am in the large building at the center of the campus that holds the dining hall and rec room. Mrs. Mack lets me take Kai’s calls from this staff phone in an alcove off the kitchen. The cord is long enough to let me drag it to the pantry and close the flimsy door.
“Fresh?” Kai asks. “That canned stuff is mostly sugar.”
“Yeah, fresh,” I say, though I am eye to eye with a row of outsize cans of fruit cocktail. Inside are cubes of yellow so soaked in heavy syrup that I can’t tell pear from pineapple. She has to know my food here is not much different from hers there. Dumplings with shreds of chicken, tater tot casserole, spaghetti. I’m growing just fine, anyway, fruit or no fruit. My puppy fat has begun to shift, as she promised it would. I see my body getting long like hers, curving to her angles; I’m morphing myself into the shape of what I’m missing.
“Is that Mrs. Mack being nice?” Kai asks.
“I guess. I mean, she kinda sucks,” I lie, but the truth under it, the one I hope Kai hears is, No one can replace you.
I like Mrs. Mack. She’s a middle-aged black lady who calls me girlie. She calls us all girlie. I love my girlies, Mrs. Mack sings out every morning when she wakes us up, and I believe her. She loves us, all of us, in the same blanket, replaceable way that my mother loved her boyfriends.
“Are you sleeping good?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” my mother says.
The pattern of these calls is set. Now she’ll ask me how I sleep, and how I did on my last math test, and I’ll ask her what book she’s reading. These little questions, the little lies we’re telling, they are promises we give each other. I will be okay if you will. When time gets short, she’ll tell me the next installment of an old bedtime tale. We’re in the middle of “Baby Ganesha at the Feast” now. I’ll close my eyes and let her smoky alto drift over me like warm fog. But this time, she breaks the pattern.
“Listen, I need for you to do me a favor. If you can.”
I hear tension in her voice, and I sit up straighter. I say, “Okay,” and it comes out halfway between agreement and a question.
I hear her swallow, and then she says, quick and quiet, “I’m doing something. I’m writing something. Like, a poem.”
It’s a strange collection of words to deliver with such low urgency. Kai is nineteen kinds of art-fart. She tells stories and draws beautifully, sings well, plays an okay mandolin. I’d be more surprised to hear she wasn’t writing poetry in prison, but she says it as if rhyme and meter have been declared contraband. It’s almost confessional, the way an inmate might say I’m making wine inside the toilet tank, or I’m digging a tunnel to freedom with this stolen spoon.
“Okay,” I say again.
She goes on, still talking fast, her voice more urgent than the subject warrants. “I’m retelling the Ramayana. Just the part where the demon steals Sita. You remember that? Sita is living happily with Rama in the forest. Then Ravana steals her and locks her up, and it’s like prison. It’s a lot like prison. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say, and I feel my stomach curdling. She’s picked this bit of the Ramayana because she is living it. All the organs in my abdomen have gone sour; I should be in her poem, playing the part of the demon.
Kai says, “I’m going to mail the poem to you, as soon as I get it done.”
“I can’t wait to read it,” I lie.
“There’s someone else I want to read it. Do you know who I mean?” Kai asks. A thinking pause. I don’t. “I was hoping you could send it to your uncle.” Still nothing. I don’t have an uncle. “The one who used to call you Bossy Pony.”