Nearly three years had passed. Two years and eight months. She’d stopped counting the days. And they’d been keeping an eye on her ever since.
Inside the court building in Queens, there was more paperwork, more waiting, though it seemed that whenever a new officer saw the UDP mark in her file, a restrained sort of hurry, a subdued excitement, ensued. After they moved her for the third time to a third bench, Hel found herself sandwiched between the baby prostitute from the holding cell at the 114th Precinct and a tall woman with thick black hair who confided to Hel that she’d recently undergone gender reassignment surgery in Thailand—“the whole shebang”—but that her ID still classified her as a man. She’d been held in lockup with male prisoners. “I mean, luckily, all those guys in there were real gentlemen about it,” she said. “Luckily! God, I can’t believe I was so dumb! My ex told me to get my license changed, but I was like, why bother—it’s not like I even drive in this city.”
A rumpled but handsome young man called Hel’s name, and she came to attention. Standing before her, he sorted through a stack of folders. Her public defender. That meant Vikram either still hadn’t heard about her arrest or didn’t care. “How are you going to plead?” he asked, leading her to a booth just outside the holding area.
She’d already decided not to speak, no matter what, so she shrugged mutely.
“Look, my job is to defend you, but I need you to help me out. It looks like you violated a restraining order, that’s a charge of Criminal Contempt in the first degree. A class-E felony. And as you know, they took a four-inch gravity knife off of you. They’ll probably go for Stalking in the second degree, plus Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the fourth.”
“But I wasn’t—” she said, startled out of her resolution. “That’s for protection! I always carry it.”
Around the corner, out of sight but still in earshot, the whole-shebang woman whistled. “Damn, mamí!”
“You’re gonna want to plead to Stalking in the third, if I can swing it with the ADA. Get you one year in jail, with post-release supervision. Not a bad deal, for someone like you.”
“What? No! I’m not guilty. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The lawyer shrugged. “All right, then. Your funeral. Come on, they’re calling your docket number.”
Inside the small courtroom, dim and stifling with dry radiator heat, a judge, a clerk, some kind of stick—a bailiff, maybe—and a second suit sat waiting for them. The prosecuting attorney. Hel listened numbly as her lawyer waived the formal reading of the charges against her. She listened as the prosecutor argued that her lack of employment and lack of ties to the community made her a flight risk despite her previously clean record. He mentioned the antisocial tendencies typical of UDPs, stopping just short of referring to Joslan Micallef by name. Hel’s attorney attempted to argue that since Hel reliably presented herself at Reintegration Education classes and since she was prohibited by law from changing her residence without approval anyway, she’d have nowhere to flee, but the judge set bail.
Her attorney bargained the initial figure down to some slightly lower amount, which she still couldn’t pay, and it was all over.
They left the courtroom. Hel felt exhausted. Did any of her associates have that kind of money? the attorney wanted to know. Did she know anyone who owned property? She didn’t answer him, and after a minute, he left her in peace, taking her folder along with him.
An officer returned her to the bench to wait some more; no doubt additional paperwork would need to be filled out before they sent her to wherever they were going to hold her until trial. Her friend the whole shebang was gone by now, but the young cherry was still there. Hel looked at the girl’s thin legs, clad in sheer tights. She felt in her pocket, searching for something to give her, but all that was in there was her carbon of her property voucher. “Are you all right?” she asked.
The cherry sniffled. “What you fuckin’ think, bitch. Fuck off.” But there was no hostility in her voice. Their shoulders were an inch apart. Hel felt that inch like a touch. It was a comfort to her and a scourge, just as the hand-holding in Calvary had been. She resented the proximity but wouldn’t have moved over if she could.
After a minute, the sound of heels signaled that someone else approached them, a woman dressed in a nice skirt and a silk blouse. Surely another lawyer—the cherry’s. “Good luck,” Hel told her sincerely.
“Are you Helen Nash?” the lawyer asked.
The prostitute rolled her eyes. “No.”
“I am,” Hel said.
“Come with me.”
No one looked twice at them as they walked down the hallway. The lawyer woman held the stairwell door open.
“What’s happening? Did someone pay my bail?” Vikram, she thought, hopeful despite herself.
The woman shrugged. “Dr. Oliveira says to pull yourself together.”
Vikram thumped down the stairs to the basement and sprinted to the end of the hallway, out of breath. He was only twenty minutes late for Reintegration Education and he’d never missed a session before. He peeked into the room through the wire-embedded window set in the door. There was the group, sitting in a circle. Wes picked at his cuticles. Agnew, the new addition, worked out some kind of equation on the back of an envelope. Catalina Calderón appeared to be sound asleep.
Vikram opened the door. “Mr. Bhatnagar! We were worried you were sick, or that you’d gotten into an accident.” Sato reached behind her for the tablet she used to take attendance, tapping on its screen. Would he be written up, or was she letting him off the hook? He’d find out later, he supposed.
The metal chair squealed as he dragged it into position. “No. I’m not sick. The train was stopped.” Old Catalina scoffed at him under her breath. “I guess somebody was on the tracks killing himself,” Vikram said. “Trying to touch the third rail.” He hoped this was plausible. He’d never been sure exactly how that worked.
“I have days like that,” Catalina said.
The comment was loud enough that Sato had to address it. “Mrs. Calderón, it’s not your turn to talk. Mr. Pikarski was about to check in. Please continue, Mr. Pikarski.”
“Yeah, so this was a really good week,” Pikarski said. “I had no idea that my cousin’s son made it out. He’s been living here—in Kansas City, Missouri—since he passed through. I never would have known, but I was searching for names on the internet the other night. You know.”
Yes, they knew. They’d done it themselves, fishing blindly in the ether.
“He was in his local paper. He came in third in a 5K, can you believe it? And I’m like, there can’t be that many Andre Pikarskis out there. And there was a picture. I knew in a minute—would have known him anywhere.”
“This kind of thing wouldn’t happen,” Poornima Anthikkad said, “if they’d just publish the damn directory.” Certain members of the group groaned or shifted position restlessly; this was an old topic of debate and most of them were tired of hearing it hashed and rehashed.
“Are you crazy?” Agnew asked. “Sure, a directory might be convenient, but can you imagine what it would be like if anyone and everyone could find out who we are? If they put all our names in one place, publicly accessible? Thank God someone filed a cease and desist on that.”
“They put the mark already on our IDs,” Catalina said. “If the government wants names, look, they already have! Look at us all, here, under their thumb. They can round us up anytime they want.”
“I’m not even talking about that,” Agnew said. “I’m just talking about all the sad shitfoots out there who resent us. Who call us aliens and say we’re taking their jobs and whatnot. You want to find trash burning on your doorstep?”