I ignore her, blocking the sunlight with my hand so I can peek up at the ledges of the windows beneath the overhanging roof. The grease of the hot dog is soaking through the napkin as it warms in my hand.
“Look at her trying to catch that cat,” she says, loudly enough that I know it’s for me to hear, not just her friends. She’s a big woman, with a crew cut left longish on the bottom and tattoos on both her forearms. I know her name: Martha. “You looking for some pussy, old lady? I got it right here for you.”
Her friends laugh. A glance, ever so small, confirms what I suspected from the sound of the laughter. The long-haired girl, Amber Jones, is seated at that table. As long as I’ve been here, I’d have to be as dumb as a post not to decipher this relationship. Whether Martha is wooing the other girl or already owns her, I’m not sure, but either way the alliance is a clear and dangerous one. Alexandra, the girl I see at Mass each week, is there, too. Every Sunday she shakes my hand during the Sign of Peace, and on the other six days she clusters with the group of women who most like to taunt me. On the outside this would hurt me deeply, but I know, in here, that’s just the way it is. I turn my search for Clementine toward the section of the yard closer to where the officers hold their posts near the occasional blast of air-conditioning from the swinging doors. I feel Martha’s gaze following me.
But before I can walk too far, she’s up, she’s coming at me, and I know that even though I’m no match for her I can only stand my ground. The sun flashes behind her head, making one of her small mean eyes vanish in its piercing gleam. Her fist rises, and when I raise my hands to protect myself I feel a burning, hair-thin slash across my arm, an unzipping of my skin. I cry out and grab my wounded limb, my fingers coated in the sticky ooze of my blood, and turn my side toward her. She stabs me again, this time in my bicep—a jab that only feels like an afterthought, because the pain from the first cut is searing. Two officers are dragging her away now, another running toward me, pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves. It’s a stinging like a hundred bees. The blood between my fingers makes my arm feel as though it’s melting away beneath my hand. The officer sets her palm against my back and guides me toward the building, and I stumble the way she directs me amidst all the shouting, through a tunnel made out of sunlight and shadows and noise.
The nurse is ready with a pressure bandage when I arrive; they must have radioed her. “You again,” she says. “You need to stop getting into trouble.”
I slump into the chair, and she brushes away my gripping hand with one of her gloved ones. She pats the wound with gauze. Her appraising glance moves up and down my arm, and the wound is longer than I expected, a good six- or seven-inch gash. “She got you good,” the nurse says.
“Can you numb it first?”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Numb it?”
“Before you stitch it.”
Her laugh is low and rumbly. “I can’t stitch that.”
I feel a pang of dread. I debate whether I have the nerve to do it myself, if she’s willing to offer me the supplies.
“She definitely needs a transport,” the nurse says, catching the eye of the officer who brought me in.
“All right. Bandage her up. I don’t want any blood getting on me.”
I don’t understand. They can’t be taking me to a real hospital, not for this. But when two more guards walk into the clinic and shackle my ankles, I realize they really are. My arm is bandaged, my wrists cuffed—the nurse won’t allow them to be latched to a chain around my waist, saying my arm needs to be kept above the level of my heart—and within minutes I’m in the back of a van that is driving away.
It’s that easy.
We’re driving right past those irrigated fields. Through intersections with stoplights in cases that are black instead of the yellow I remember. Past gas stations filled with tiny, rounded cars and pumps with digital numbers. A burger place appears at the side of the road with a curl of smoke puffing up through its roof, and the van’s ventilation system catches the scent and filters it back to me. It smells like heaven, like youth and nights on the boardwalk and everything good. I gasp at the potency of it and choke back a small cry, force myself to swallow, then try to breathe it in again. The officer beside me looks at me strangely, but says nothing.
We pass a high school with a team of tennis players chasing each other around on its courts. A little townhouse development with a child playing in a turtle-shaped sandbox in a backyard. A jogger—a woman in blue shorts and sneakers and a white elastic bra, and that’s all—running along the side of the road, her long ponytail swinging. She has no idea how free she is, how free.
We turn up the road to the hospital. I swallow, and I look to the C.O. “You know, I had a baby and they didn’t even take me to the hospital for that.”
She shoots me a cautious look. “How long ago was it?”
“Twenty-four years ago.”
“They’re more worried about liability now. Inmates suing ’em.”
Gauze is wrapped tightly around my arm, nearly saturated with blood. I’ve been shivved before, several times, but this is the worst of those. We pull up to the emergency doors, and as the officer up front opens the side door he says to me, “Don’t do anything stupid, now.”
It’s a fresh shame inside the emergency room, where everyone looks at me and steps aside when I walk in, chains rattling and clinking like the bells on a plague wagon. Everything is unfamiliar— so polished and sanitary— but there’s a baby resting against the shoulder of her mother, who is seated in a hallway chair, and I’m enchanted. It’s been years since I last saw a baby. She’s so plump and large-eyed, with a little shock of a pigtail at the top of her head, tied with a ribbon. I used to see babies in the visitors’ room sometimes, but only since Annemarie began coming have I had visitors again, and there have been no babies so far. I stare at her, and she smiles at me around the finger she is chewing.
I’m led to a curtained room, and a doctor follows us in right away. The officer unlatches my wrist cuffs so the nurse can unwind the gauze from my arm. “Do you see that cute little baby?” I ask.
“I see her. Don’t gawk at her.”
“She’s just adorable. And I’m not gawking.”
“Yes, you are. And how would you like it if you saw somebody in chains and handcuffs staring at your child?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I look away.
“Looks like you got shanked,” the doctor says. He’s young, and I suppose he’s trying out his prison slang. The nurse is cleaning out the wound, which hurts more than anything else so far, but I’m trying not to react.
“I don’t usually get into fights,” I explain. My voice is tight from the pain of the cleaning. “I got into someone’s bad graces, I suppose.”
“Not your fault, huh,” he says in an ironic tone. I find this extremely irritating. It’s no challenge to read what he’s thinking— that I’m like every other inmate who believes she is always the victim, never responsible for her circumstances. He’s perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and he thinks he’s wise to the ways of people like me. I’ve been in there since he was in diapers.
“I didn’t say that,” I point out.
“We’ll get you stitched up and send you back,” he says. “Put you on an antibiotic to kill off whatever might have been on that thing. You know what it was made out of? It’s a good clean cut.”
“Razor blade stuck in a toothbrush,” the officer says.
“Clever.” The doctor pulls out a needle and the suture kit and goes to work on my arm. I try not to wince, and he says, “Tough girl.”