“It’s okay,” he kept telling her, “it’s okay,” but his face betrayed him. He looked scared, looked as if he’d been drained of blood in some evil experiment in yet another movie, and a part of her wanted to be sorry for him, but another part, the part that was so commanding and fierce it overrode everything else, couldn’t begin to be.
He was useless, and he knew it. He’d never been so purely sick at heart and terrified in all his life, but he tried to be there for her, tried to do his best, and when the baby came out, the baby girl all slick with blood and mucus and the lumped white stuff that was like something spilled at the bottom of a garbage can, he was thinking of the ninth grade and how close he’d come to fainting while the teacher went around the room to prick their fingers one by one so they each could smear a drop of blood across a slide. He didn’t faint now. But he was close to it, so close he could feel the room dodging away under his feet. And then her voice, the first intelligible thing she’d said in an hour: “Get rid of it. Just get rid of it.”
Of the drive back to Binghamton he remembered nothing. Or practically nothing. They took towels from the motel and spread them across the seat of her car, he could remember that much … and the blood, how could he forget the blood? It soaked through her sweats and the towels and even the thick cotton bathmat and into the worn fabric of the seat itself. And it all came from inside her, all of it, tissue and mucus and the shining bright fluid, no end to it, as if she’d been turned inside out. He wanted to ask her about that, if that was normal, but she was asleep the minute she slid out from under his arm and dropped into the seat. If he focused, if he really concentrated, he could remember the way her head lolled against the doorframe while the engine whined and the car rocked and the slush threw a dark blanket over the windshield every time a truck shot past in the opposite direction. That and the exhaustion. He’d never been so tired, his head on a string, shoulders slumped, his arms like two pillars of concrete. And what if he’d nodded off? What if he’d gone into a skid and hurtled over an embankment into the filthy gray accumulation of the worst day of his life? What then?
She made it into the dorm under her own power, nobody even looked at her, and no, she didn’t need his help. “Call me,” she whispered, and they kissed, her lips so cold it was like kissing a steak through the plastic wrapper, and then he parked her car in the student lot and walked to the bus station. He made Danbury late that night, caught a ride out to the motel, and walked right through the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Fifteen minutes. That was all it took. He bundled up everything, every trace, left the key in the box at the desk, and stood scraping the ice off the windshield of his car while the night opened up above him to a black glitter of sky. He never gave a thought to what lay discarded in the Dumpster out back, itself wrapped in plastic, so much meat, so much cold meat.
He was at the very pinnacle of his dream, the river dressed in its currents, the deep hole under the cutbank, and the fish like silver bullets swarming to his bait, when they woke him — when Rob woke him, Rob Greiner, his roommate, Rob with a face of crumbling stone and two policemen there at the door behind him and the roar of the dorm falling away to a whisper. And that was strange, policemen, a real anomaly in that setting, and at first — for the first thirty seconds, at least — he had no idea what they were doing there. Parking tickets? Could that be it? But then they asked him his name, just to confirm it, joined his hands together behind his back, and fitted two loops of naked metal over his wrists, and he began to understand. He saw McCaffrey and Tuttle from across the hall staring at him as if he were Jeffrey Dahmer or something, and the rest of them, all the rest, every head poking out of every door up and down the corridor, as the police led him away.
“What’s this all about?” he kept saying, the cruiser nosing through the dark streets to the station house, the man at the wheel and the man beside him as incapable of speech as the seats or the wire mesh or the gleaming black dashboard that dragged them forward into the night. And then it was up the steps and into an explosion of light, more men in uniform, stand here, give me your hand, now the other one, and then the cage and the questions. Only then did he think of that thing in the garbage sack and the sound it had made — its body had made — when he flung it into the Dumpster like a sack of flour and the lid slammed down on it. He stared at the walls, and this was a movie too. He’d never been in trouble before, never been inside a police station, but he knew his role well enough, because he’d seen it played out a thousand times on the tube: deny everything. Even as the two detectives settled in across from him at the bare wooden table in the little box of the overlit room he was telling himself just that: Deny it, deny it all.
The first detective leaned forward and set his hands on the table as if he’d come for a manicure. He was in his thirties, or maybe his forties, a tired-looking man with the scars of the turmoil he’d witnessed gouged into the flesh under his eyes. He didn’t offer a cigarette (“I don’t smoke,” Jeremy was prepared to say, giving them that much at least), and he didn’t smile or soften his eyes. And when he spoke his voice carried no freight at all, not outrage or threat or cajolery — it was just a voice, flat and tired. “Do you know a China Berkowitz?” he said.
And she. She was in the community hospital, where the ambulance had deposited her after her roommate had called 911 in a voice that was like a bone stuck in the back of her throat, and it was raining again. Her parents were there, her mother red-eyed and sniffling, her father looking like an actor who’s forgotten his lines, and there was another woman there too, a policewoman. The policewoman sat in an orange plastic chair in the corner, dipping her head to the knitting in her lap. At first, China’s mother had tried to be pleasant to the woman, but pleasant wasn’t what the circumstances called for, and now she ignored her, because the very unpleasant fact was that China was being taken into custody as soon as she was released from the hospital.
For a long while no one said anything — everything had already been said, over and over, one long flood of hurt and recrimination — and the antiseptic silence of the hospital held them in its grip while the rain beat at the windows and the machines at the foot of the bed counted off numbers. From down the hall came a snatch of TV dialogue, and for a minute China opened her eyes and thought she was back in the dorm. “Honey,” her mother said, raising a purgatorial face to her, “are you all right? Can I get you anything?”
“I need to — I think I need to pee.”
“Why?” her father demanded, and it was the perfect non sequitur. He was up out of the chair, standing over her, his eyes like cracked porcelain. “Why didn’t you tell us, or at least tell your mother — or Dr. Fredman? Dr. Fredman, at least. He’s been — he’s like a family member, you know that, and he could have, or he would have … What were you thinking, for Christ’s sake?”
Thinking? She wasn’t thinking anything, not then and not now. All she wanted — and she didn’t care what they did to her, beat her, torture her, drag her weeping through the streets in a dirty white dress with “Baby Killer” stitched over her breast in scarlet letters — was to see Jeremy. Just that. Because what really mattered was what he was thinking.
The food at the Sarah Barnes Cooper Women’s Correctional Institute was exactly what they served at the dining hall in college, heavy on the sugars, starches, and bad cholesterol, and that would have struck her as ironic if she’d been there under other circumstances — doing community outreach, say, or researching a paper for her sociology class. But given the fact that she’d been locked up for more than a month now, the object of the other girls’ threats, scorn, and just plain nastiness, given the fact that her life was ruined beyond any hope of redemption, and every newspaper in the country had her shrunken white face plastered across its front page under a headline that screamed MOTEL MOM, she didn’t have much use for irony. She was scared twenty-four hours a day. Scared of the present, scared of the future, scared of the reporters waiting for the judge to set bail so that they could swarm all over her the minute she stepped out the door. She couldn’t concentrate on the books and magazines her mother brought her or even on the TV in the rec room. She sat in her room — it was a room, just like a dorm room, except that they locked you in at night — and stared at the walls, eating peanuts, M&M’s, sunflower seeds by the handful, chewing for the pure animal gratification of it. She was putting on more weight, and what did it matter?