Jeremy was different. He’d lost everything — his walk, his smile, the muscles of his upper arms and shoulders. Even his hair lay flat now, as if he couldn’t bother with a tube of gel and a comb. When she saw him at the arraignment, saw him for the first time since she’d climbed out of the car and limped into the dorm with the blood wet on her legs, he looked like a refugee, like a ghost. The room they were in — the courtroom — seemed to have grown up around them, walls, windows, benches, lights and radiators already in place, along with the judge, the American flag and the ready-made spectators. It was hot. People coughed into their fists and shuffled their feet, every sound magnified. The judge presided, his arms like bones twirled in a bag, his eyes searching and opaque as he peered over the top of his reading glasses.
China’s lawyer didn’t like Jeremy’s lawyer, that much was evident, and the state prosecutor didn’t like anybody. She watched him — Jeremy, only him — as the reporters held their collective breath and the judge read off the charges and her mother bowed her head and sobbed into the bucket of her hands. And Jeremy was watching her too, his eyes locked on hers as if he defied them all, as if nothing mattered in the world but her, and when the judge said “First-degree murder” and “Murder by abuse or neglect,” he never flinched.
She sent him a note that day—“I love you, will always love you no matter what, More than Moon”—and in the hallway, afterward, while their lawyers fended off the reporters and the bailiffs tugged impatiently at them, they had a minute, just a minute, to themselves. “What did you tell them?” he whispered. His voice was a rasp, almost a growl; she looked at him, inches away, and hardly recognized him.
“I told them it was dead.”
“My lawyer — Mrs. Teagues? — she says they’re saying it was alive when we, when we put it in the bag.” His face was composed, but his eyes were darting like insects trapped inside his head.
“It was dead.”
“It looked dead,” he said, and already he was pulling away from her and some callous shit with a camera kept annihilating them with flash after flash of light, “and we certainly didn’t — I mean, we didn’t slap it or anything to get it breathing….”
And then the last thing he said to her, just as they were pulled apart, and it was nothing she wanted to hear, nothing that had any love in it, or even the hint of love: “You told me to get rid of it.”
There was no elaborate name for the place where they were keeping him. It was known as Drum Hill Prison, period. No reform-minded notions here, no verbal gestures toward rehabilitation or behavior modification, no benefactors, mayors or role models to lend the place their family names, but then who in his right mind would want a prison named after him anyway? At least they kept him separated from the other prisoners, the gangbangers and dope dealers and sexual predators and the like. He was no longer a freshman at Brown, not officially, but he had his books and his course notes, and he tried to keep up as best he could. Still, when the screams echoed through the cellblock at night and the walls dripped with the accumulated breath of eight and a half thousand terminally angry sociopaths, he had to admit it wasn’t the sort of college experience he’d bargained for.
And what had he done to deserve it? He still couldn’t understand. That thing in the Dumpster — and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby — was nobody’s business but his and China’s. That’s what he’d told his attorney, Mrs. Teagues, and his mother and her boyfriend, Howard, and he’d told them over and over again: “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Even if it was alive, and it was, he knew in his heart that it was, even before the state prosecutor presented evidence of blunt-force trauma and death by asphyxiation and exposure, it didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have mattered. There was no baby. There was nothing but a mistake, a mistake clothed in blood and mucus. When he really thought about it, thought it through on its merits and dissected all his mother’s pathetic arguments about where he’d be today if she’d felt as he did when she was pregnant herself, he hardened like a rock, like sand turning to stone under all the pressure the planet can bring to bear. Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world? They should have given him a medal.
It was the end of January before bail was set — three hundred and fifty thousand dollars his mother didn’t have — and he was released to house arrest. He wore a plastic anklet that set off an alarm if he went out the door, and so did she, so did China, imprisoned like some fairy-tale princess at her parents’ house. At first, she called him every day, but mostly what she did was cry—“I want to see it,” she sobbed. “I want to see our daughter’s grave.” That froze him inside. He tried to picture her — her now, China, the love of his life — and he couldn’t. What did she look like? What was her face like, her nose, her hair, her eyes and breasts and the slit between her legs? He drew a blank. There was no way to summon her the way she used to be or even the way she was in court, because all he could remember was the thing that had come out of her, four limbs and the equipment of a female, shoulders rigid and eyes shut tight, as if she were a mummy in a tomb … and the breath, the shuddering long gasping rattle of a breath he could feel ringing inside her even as the black plastic bag closed over her face and the lid of the Dumpster opened like a mouth.
He was in the den, watching basketball, a drink in his hand (7Up mixed with Jack Daniel’s in a ceramic mug, so no one would know he was getting shit-faced at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon), when the phone rang. It was Sarah Teagues. “Listen, Jeremy,” she said in her crisp, equitable tones, “I thought you ought to know — the Berkowitzes are filing a motion to have the case against China dropped.”
His mother’s voice on the portable, too loud, a blast of amplified breath and static: “On what grounds?”
“She never saw the baby, that’s what they’re saying. She thought she had a miscarriage.”
“Yeah, right,” his mother said.
Sarah Teagues was right there, her voice as clear and present as his mother’s. “Jeremy’s the one that threw it in the Dumpster, and they’re saying he acted alone. She took a polygraph test day before yesterday.”
He could feel his heart pounding the way it used to when he plodded up that last agonizing ridge behind the school with the cross-country team, his legs sapped, no more breath left in his body. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even breathe.
“She’s going to testify against him.”
Outside was the world, puddles of ice clinging to the lawn under a weak afternoon sun, all the trees stripped bare, the grass dead, the azalea under the window reduced to an armload of dead brown twigs. She wouldn’t have wanted to go out today anyway. This was the time of year she hated most, the long interval between the holidays and spring break, when nothing grew and nothing changed — it didn’t even seem to snow much anymore. What was out there for her anyway? They wouldn’t let her see Jeremy, wouldn’t even let her talk to him on the phone or write him anymore, and she wouldn’t be able to show her face at the mall or even the movie theater without somebody shouting out her name as if she was a freak, as if she was another Monica Lewinsky or Heidi Fleiss. She wasn’t China Berkowitz, honor student, not anymore — she was the punch line to a joke, a footnote to history.