Julie’s body shook momentarily and the small spasm traveled up through Jane’s arm.
“Julie?” Jane pressed the girl’s hand hard, rocked it gently.
“Is this because she can hear me?”
“Sure… it could be.”
This was a lie, Jane realized.
She examined Julie’s hand. The nails on the thumb and index finger were red, but the other three nails so pale that the white arcs at the torn cuticles were almost invisible.
The same thought recurred roughly every ten seconds: it ought to be possible to wind back time, to remake the end of the story because the definitive moment was just a moment and surely should be much easier to reverse than a long chain of cause and effect. This childish notion emerged and was rejected. Over and over again.
Without turning around, Jane asked if anyone had any nail polish. No one answered.
From some distant place, she heard her own voice.
“In my bag, maybe in the waiting room… I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”
Six months later, she woke in the dark. She didn’t know if it was early in the morning or late at night. There was a smile on her face when she woke, a fool’s smile that lasted for the few seconds it took her to realize what was what. Then she had to start her breathing practice. These are my toes, I can curl them. Breathe out. Breathe in. These are my legs, they’re tensing now. Upward next, muscle by muscle.
She connected a charger to her cell phone and waited until it showed the time of day. Four missed calls, one from her father and three from an unknown number. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she tried to remember how it used to feel before when you had three unknown missed calls. Then her phone rang. The display showed the same number.
The man at the other end introduced himself as the prison chaplain at the Jackson Correctional Institute.
“I have tried to reach you at the university because I knew you had been working there. But you’re not there anymore, is that right? But the lady who took my call, she might be named Ellen? She told me that you were going away—or?”
The prison chaplain seemed to speak in questions and sounded like a seventeen-year-old. He said that Scott Myers had tried to commit suicide twice. Jane couldn’t cope with holding the phone to her ear just then. The small, boxed-in voice continued to speak into the mattress. A gap between the curtains let in a shaft of blue light that swept the room and read it like the beam of a scanner: naked thighs spreading on top of a crumpled sheet, steely reflections from cutlery on top of a pile of plates, bundles of clothes, scrunched-up papers like trembling small animals taken by surprise.
She shifted position, picked up the phone, and carried on listening to the voice. The chaplain had another question on his mind.
“Perhaps this is too much to ask? I’m not even putting the request as a preliminary question. I simply pass it on.”
Jane longed for a feeling she could do something with.
“He is very anxious to talk to you. Naturally, I will be present.”
Her voice grew out of the darkness. “I’ll do it if I can see him alone.”
“No problem at all, this isn’t a high-security institution.”
The following Tuesday, Jane parked by the side of the road near a tall blue-painted water tower a little way from the prison, and waited there while the shadow of the tower moved across the car and into the edge of the forest.
The visiting area was a café run by the prison inmates. Jane’s cup of coffee was presumably charged to Scott Myers’s account. Myers ordered nothing for himself. Jane sat opposite him at a picnic table outside the café. Between them on the table lay a key on a loop of white string. Myers had grown paler but also bigger. As if he had been to a training camp, Jane suggested. That extra weight must be an advantage on the field.
“I got sixteen years, Mrs. Ashland. I will be forty-one when they let me out.”
One year older than Jane was at the time.
“They tell me you’ve been trying to hang yourself.”
He nodded slowly.
“Is it the slipknot you can’t get right?”
Myers searched her face and eyes for a sign of humor. Jane knew he would find nothing. Other people served as mirrors, and, in their blank faces, she saw reflections of her own baffling lack of expression. There was something wrong about the fit between what she said and what she looked like, a disconnect that upset people profoundly. Deep down, they felt impelled to exclude her from the flock. Jane knew she was close to losing her already tenuous grasp of how to be human.
“It wouldn’t have been so difficult at home in the garage but they take everything away from you here,” Myers said.
At a neighboring table, a Latin American family nearly filled the quota of six visitors. Two teenage daughters picked unenthusiastically at a casserole dish and responded in single syllables when their mother urged them to join in the conversation. A little boy had climbed up onto the lap of the prisoner and was hitting his chest with his fists. The sky above was wide open, contradicting the idea that one place should be shut off from another.
Jane put the coffee cup down and fixed her eyes on the clay-like dregs.
“Where do I come into this?”
“I wondered if you could forgive me, Mrs. Ashland.”
“Ms.”
“What?”
“Ms. Ashland. I am a widow. Besides, it is usually regarded as sexist to define a woman by her marital status.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Myers held out his hands.
He had no idea what she was on about.
“So, you believe it would be helpful if I forgave you?”
Myers raised his large hands to his face and kneaded his cheeks and his greasy forehead.
“It might make some things easier for me,” he said.
He was large and sheepish. Jane thought he was a beast harboring all kinds of lusts, imagined him grunting on the football field and making coarse comments about the cheerleaders. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wanted to think he had violated Julie.
He placed his large hands on the table and pushed the key around in little circles.
“I see. You feel that it’s my job to make things easier for you?”
“No, Ms. Ashland.”
Myers kept looking over his shoulder. There was nothing to see except a soda machine against a cement wall. She registered suddenly that he was trembling inside his green jumpsuit.
“I can’t feel free, if you see what I mean, not free for real, but free inside my head. It’s not about being locked up here. But I’m scared all the time that I’ll go crazy.”
“Join the club,” she said in a low snarl.
“I didn’t mean it like that, Miss Ashland.”
“Ms.!” A noise like a snake. “The s is sounded. It’s not the same as Miss.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
Myers turned his head toward the vending machine again.
“What’s up?” Jane asked.
He quickly turned back to face her.
“Why do you keep looking over there?”
“I don’t know, Ms. Ashland.” He started to fiddle with the key again. “But I think it would be easier to feel remorse properly and really take my punishment if I don’t go sick in the head. If I managed to think the right things. You see, she’s there all the time. With me.”