Listening now, she could overhear the ritual that took place each time a woman came to live in the prison nursery with her newborn, a ritual utterly contrary to human nature, yet unremarkable in this place for its bureaucratic regularity, its numbed procedurality; they were taking another baby away from his mother. I don't want to see this, Christina thought, her fingernails pressing the mop handle. But she lingered outside the mother's room, just close enough to see the baby boy, whose name was Nushawn, being held by his mother, Shannelle, one last time. The maternity ward administrator, a kindly woman in her forties, watched, too, as did the relative who would take care of Nushawn until his mother was free-years hence. How long, Christina wondered, how long will they let Shannelle hold her baby? The answer was not long enough, never long enough. Now Shannelle collapsed in grief around Nushawn, who, unknowing, patted at a yellow barrette in her hair. Shannelle had come to Bedford Hills pregnant, after she and her sister had gone out one night to buy candy and two men had come up and asked them where So-and-so lived. The girls, nobody's fools, may have expected an incentive for their trouble, and after a brief negotiation walked the men over to the house in question, a distance of no more than a block, and when they knocked on the door, the police were inside, having just arrested its inhabitants for cooking and selling crack. The two girls got different public defenders, one a realist, the other a fool; Shannelle was assigned the fool, a recent law graduate of Harvard. Her sister agreed to a plea, avoided a trial, and got a year. Shannelle's lawyer convinced her that she was innocent and that he would make an impassioned defense if she'd allow him to take her case to trial. It was the first time a white, college-educated male had ever shown such an interest in her, and so she fearfully agreed to his proposition. The jury found her guilty in forty minutes, and the judge reluctantly sentenced her according to the harsh edicts of the Rockefeller drug laws, which meant Shannelle received three years to life.
"All right now," sighed the nursing administrator, signaling the moment of removal. Shannelle crushed her son against herself, then looked up, eyes full. "You know I'll just die in here," she moaned. "I can't, I can't." But her baby was gently lifted from her and placed in the arms of the waiting relative.
Don't look anymore, Christina told herself. She pushed her mop along the floor, over the exact edges of linoleum she'd traveled the day prior. The weeks and months were eating at her, going slower, not faster. What at first had been unendurable she had learned to suffer, and what had seemed inconsequential now stood as intolerable. Years were dragging by at the rate of decades, it seemed; time was killing her as it killed all the women there, making them sag and sicken, fatten and wrinkle, taking their hope and children and teeth. She had three years before the parole board would hear her case. Four down, three to go. Of course, seven years represented only the minimum sentence for conspiracy to possess stolen property. The maximum was twenty-five. If you misbehaved, they added time-simple as that, and nearly every other prisoner who reached the minimum sentence returned to prison with a tale of the parole board's injustice. So you tried to build a behavior record, you tried to be agreeable and silent. Yes, she thought bitterly, here I am, so agreeable, so silent. The word, in fact, was powerless — she'd been so powerless for four years now, had tried to live by the endless fucking rules, and it hadn't worked. She was not repentant. She was not rehabilitated. She was not "corrected." How absurd that she'd ended up in prison. Sure, if she could go back in time, she wouldn't ever repeat the idiotic behavior that had landed her there. She should have quit before the very last job, told Tony Verducci and Rick that she was done with them, and everything would have been different. Yet knowing this was no consolation now, today. She had to do something, had to find out something about herself. She was willing to suffer the punishment. Maybe she wanted the punishment. She wanted something.
A urine test cup, in fact. She wanted one of the small, crushable paper cups that the maternity unit used, sealed on the inside so that no fluid seeped out. She needed this cup; she'd been thinking about this cup for two weeks now. If she actually used it as she planned, then she assumed some retribution from the guards would come her way. They punched you out in the showers, or tore up your room on a search, which in her case meant that they'd be eager to confiscate or otherwise ruin her books, the only thing of value to her in her cell. Well, fuck them, and fuck that. The more important question was whether she might be delaying her own parole, if the thing went bad, and as she evaluated the odds, she had to conclude that, yes, she was running a risk. Yet that question remained far-off, theoretical. The problem with Mazy was here and now. Besides, Christina had been good, had avoided fights and taken all the classes she could, and used the library, pathetic and remedial as it was, and generally put up with everyone and their attitudes and their mind games, yet here was Mazy threatened with a couple of months in the SHU by Soft T. For nothing. No, not for nothing. Mazy wouldn't give the guard what he wanted. Mazy had three children who hadn't seen their mother in four months, and if she went into the segregated housing unit before they were due to visit in a few days-well, they all would suffer, and who knew what crazy stuff Mazy might try. She'd attempted suicide once years ago, but Christina was less worried about that than she was that Mazy would go into the SHU and then come out crazy or zombied-in which case she'd start to accumulate violations and go back into the SHU for real reasons, and maybe for a long time.
But Christina couldn't let that happen. They had an understanding, she and Mazy. She was stronger than Mazy, at least on the outside. But when they lay together, Christina's head on Mazy's dark fallen breasts, their delta of stretchmarks strangely beautiful, she felt peaceful. She could rest there, in the smell of talcum powder under Mazy's armpits and between her legs. Mazy understood. Rest now, baby. Mazy was too good for the place, too good for almost anywhere, which was why she'd been hurt so many times. She wished only to love and be loved, even once confessing to Christina that she wished she could heal babies and children by laying her hands upon them. That she couldn't was a genuine sorrow to her.
In the hallway Christina passed Kathy Boudin, the Vietnam-era revolutionary who with others had robbed a Brink's armored truck in 1981. Boudin, a distinguished-looking older woman now, still organized, still agitated, but for the inmates with AIDS. Some sympathizers had tried to break her out of Bedford Hills years back, rolling a truck up to the chain-link fence. But most of the women were in for crimes far less exotic, drug charges or assault. A good percentage were in for murder-almost always of their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes their children. You never asked directly what people had done, yet word got around. Many of the nine hundred women there knew one another from the city, and the population included sets of sisters and cousins, and, amazingly enough, even one of grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter.
Now Christina pushed the mop toward the maternity unit's kitchen, where Dora was washing out plastic nursing bottles.
"Okay, I'm here," Christina called softly. "You get it?"
Dora, a heavyset woman of fifty, looked up. "No, Miss Metzger locked the closet."
"I'll get it, then."
"Oh, honey, I don't want you to do this," Dora whispered. She was in for the rest of her life for dropping a television on her sleeping husband's head and then setting fire to him. She'd seen dozens of younger women thrash and scream and hurt themselves through their time in the prison.
"Everybody think you going be sorry you do this," warned Dora. "They catch you doing this, that's a Tier 3 offense. They throw you in the SHU, where nobody can check up on you, girl. How you going read them books you like? How you going get some sleep and exercise, they throw you in there?"