All for a Sister (12 page)

Eyes closed and face stinging, Dana reached blindly for the towel she knew to be hanging just in front of her to the left. Not finding it with her fingers, she opened her eyes to see the ragged,
grayish cloth folded around Carrie’s nose. When she’d finished blowing, she held it out, saying, “Do you need this?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” Dana rushed back to her bed to dry her face on her blanket. It was somewhat cleaner, anyway.

“Two minutes, or you’re too late!” Mrs. Karistin fixed her key into the lock, and the familiar groaning of the opening door spurred the girls into quicker action. “Two minutes, or too late!”

Dana dropped her dress over her head and threaded her arms through the sleeves. With stiff fingers, she tied the closure at the back of her neck, then smoothed the front, hoping to generate some warmth from the wool. Satisfied, she took her place standing at the end of her bed, arms straight at her sides, eyes forward, and waited for Mrs. Karistin’s inspection. One by one, the other girls took their places. The smallest one, directly across from Dana, stood stock-still, chin quivering. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and she’d cried morning, noon, and night since her arrival six days ago. Dana still didn’t know her name—the girl hadn’t spoken a single word—but Dana knew she’d been arrested for breaking into a blacksmith’s shop to steal coal.

Mrs. Karistin made sure to inform them of each new arrival’s transgressions.

At that moment, having announced, “Time has ticked, girls. Time has ticked,” the big woman made her way down the narrow aisle between the bunks, turning her square head slightly left, slightly right, greeting each girl in turn.

“Apple Thief . . . Pickpocket . . . Window Breaker . . .” She stopped at little Coal Grubber and clasped her hands behind her back, rocking on her heels.

“Tears again today? Poor little Coal Grubber. Tears again today.” And then she moved on, as if she’d given sufficient affection, stopping again to grip Carrie’s pointy chin in her heavy,
cigar-shaped fingers. “And what to call you, my little fresh face? What to call you? From the looks of it, I could call you Bramble Head, but there’s no crime in that. At least not out there.” She jerked her head in the vague direction of the window high on the wall. “In here, though, we don’t like our girls running around like they’re two steps off the street. We’re here to help you, turn you around, as they say. Turn you around. Looks like your first lesson today will be with a comb, if we’ve got one up to the task. Might have to go with a razor.” Mrs. Karistin smiled at that—a rare sight that revealed a uniform row of small, gray teeth—and drew Carrie closer. “But I suppose you might be more comfortable with a razor after all, wouldn’t you?”

“Her name’s Carrie,” Dana said, unable to take the sound of the woman’s voice any longer. It was deceptively high and sweet, like it had been designed to read fairy tales, but with a singsong quality that conjured nothing but revulsion and fear. Sensing new prey, but not dropping her grip on the first, Mrs. Karistin whipped her head around, her smile taking on a sinister quality.

“Well, good morning, Baby Killer. Imagine that, opening your mouth when you’ve no reason to speak. Imagine that.” She turned back to Carrie. “Looks like you’ve found yourself a new friend, Carrie.” She stopped for a moment and looked up, as if considering. Practicing, before adding, “Cutter. Carrie Cutter. Yes, I think that’s just perfect for you.”

Breakfast was, by far, the best meal of the day for the young inmates at the old Bridewell Prison. It was the only meal to be prepared fresh every day, with mounds of fluffy white eggs, steaming biscuits and gravy, or porridge, the inconsistency of which could be forgiven with the sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon,
and sometimes great chunks of cooked apple. Lunch was often little more than bread and cheese and canned fruit, and supper a bowl of some stew that had been set to simmer throughout the day. But breakfast, with its strips of bacon or fat little sausages, felt like a meal a girl could get in a real home.

Even so, it didn’t compare to the sumptuous feasts Dana had enjoyed when she was first taken away, when she’d lived in the cozy cell at the back of the Highland Park police station. There, some kind sergeant’s wife had brought her a piping hot meal three times a day on a plate covered with a blue-checked towel. Cookies sometimes, too, though Dana pocketed those to give to her mother on her frequent visits. It was the best food she’d ever eaten. The most abundant and reliable, and she’d swallowed a good bit of guilt with every bite.

In those first days, Mama promised, over and over, that everything was going to be all right. That she would talk to Mr. DuFrane. She would make him understand, convince him to talk to the police, the judge, whoever he could, to let Dana come home to her.

“He has money,” she’d said. “You would be surprised, my girl, how important money is in this world.”

Then, one day, Mama didn’t come to visit. Or the next, or the next. On the next, they brought Dana here.

This morning they had great slabs of fried cornmeal, served with a slice of bacon and hot, sweet tea in their battered tin cups. Coal Grubber could only look at her food with distrust, until Dana took a bite, proving its harmlessness. Even then, the girl nibbled with such deliberate slowness that Dana feared she might not finish before the bell rang to send them to their morning lessons. Or, worse, that Mrs. Karistin would come and take her plate away, consuming all that remained in a single, furtive swipe.

“Eat,” Dana urged, tracking Mrs. Karistin’s movements.

“If she won’t, I will.” Carrie reached her fork across the table in an attempt to spear a slice of bacon, but at the last minute, Coal Grubber snatched the plate away, her little brows knit in defiance. Up and down the long, narrow table, the girls laughed and cheered her on, and for the first time, she didn’t appear to be on the verge of tears. In fact, she smiled in a way that made two tiny ridges appear on the bridge of her nose, and she attacked her breakfast with an almost-carefree abandon.

After breakfast the girls spent an hour with Mrs. Poole, a thin, pinched-face woman of indeterminate age, who read exactly ten pages of
What Katy Did
. It was Dana’s third time to sit through the novel, and she liked it even less with each repetition. She much preferred the third in the series, when Katy experiences her adventures in Europe, but her favorite book by far was
Little Women
, with its cozy family of a mother and daughters and all their promising futures.

Once she’d read the final page for the day, Mrs. Poole wrote a question on the small blackboard at the front of the room.
Why is Katy a brave girl?
Dana, being one of the older girls, was charged with handing out the copybooks and pencils as the girls were instructed to turn to the next blank page to write an answer to the question. The littlest girls, or those who could not write, needed only wait for a few moments and Mrs. Poole would write a sentence on the board for them to copy ten times over. Something like,
She is brave because she has learned to walk again.

“I don’t think she’s brave at all,” Carrie whispered, refusing even to open her copybook. “I think she’s a stupid girl who deserves to be crippled forever.”

Dana ignored her and began writing the same answer she’d written the last time Mrs. Poole asked this question.

“Besides, it doesn’t make you brave to learn to walk. Anybody can walk. It’s what—”

Whatever thought she’d prepared was lost in the sharp, stinging sound of Mrs. Poole’s hand squarely against Carrie’s cheek.

“We do not talk during lessons.” The woman held the novel clasped to her breast like some treasured companion and stormed back to the front of the narrow classroom.

Dana ventured a guarded look at Carrie and felt her own face burn at the sight of the palmprint forming on the dark, taut skin. The girl’s eyes welled with tears, no doubt a reaction to both the pain and humiliation of the reprimand, and they splashed—two, three, four—onto the red cardboard cover of the copybook.

Feeling the kindest thing would be to look away, Dana did just that and drew a deliberate, black slash through the sentences she’d written. She moved the dulling point of her pencil to the next blank line and wrote:
We don’t think she is brave at all. We think she is stupid and deserves to be crippled forever. It doesn’t make you brave to walk. Anybody can walk. Sometimes it’s more brave to sit still.

She touched the blunted end of her pencil to her chin and looked out the window. Unlike those in the dormitory, the windows in the classroom were tall and wide, with only two thick bars running from top to bottom to indicate that the girls weren’t just students in some impoverished academy. Though the barren trees and the thin layer of muddy snow still bore the banner of winter, the sky was a clear, endless blue, what her mother used to call a “sneaky sky,” able to trick a mind into expecting warmth and blossoms and sweet new grass.

Later, in the hour before lunch and then again at three o’clock, the girls were permitted to go outside for half an hour under the watchful eye of whatever matron had drawn recess supervision duty. Here they had the chance to intermingle with the boys,
sometimes sparking reunions of brothers and sisters who had been brought in for their cooperative crimes.

Those who knew how to play—the little ones who’d been to school or the older ones who still remembered—would engage in squealing fits of tag or freeze. They weren’t permitted ropes for jumping (Mrs. Karistin liked to tell them that all the ropes were used for hanging), and there was never a continuity of interest to organize any real sport.

Dana preferred to watch from her favorite seat on a black iron bench, her face turned to the sun. She’d been too stunned to play when she first arrived, and with Mrs. Karistin’s insistence on calling her Baby Killer, the children were too afraid to invite her to join their games. Now she felt simply too old and took on the role of secondary caregiver, helping up the little ones when they fell, dusting their dirt and, later, washing their wounds, even when they trembled at her touch.

This afternoon, Coal Grubber’s cheeks, finally dry of tears, glowed a healthy pink as she and others enjoyed a squealing game of blindman’s bluff in the chilly, early-spring air, waving her arms and chasing Apple Thief, who looked nothing like a girl driven to this place by hunger. Tomorrow, Dana knew, they might be gone, each having served her juvenile sentence for her minuscule crime. Nobody stayed long. Nobody but her.

“Did you really kill a baby?”

Carrie had come to sit beside her. She’d twisted her hair into a number of braids and now tied scraps of red cloth at the bottom of each one. Wordlessly, she handed a scrap to Dana and turned, allowing Dana to braid and tie the back.

“Did you really cut someone?”

“Sure did.” She sounded proud. “My uncle. He was trying to touch me in
that way
, and I wasn’t having none of it, and he chased
me into the bathroom, and I got ahold of his razor. And I cut him.” She turned to look at Dana and made a slicing motion that started from the corner of one eye and extended clear to her ear. “There to there. So much blood, like you’ve never seen. He was screamin’ and chokin’ the life out of me when my mama found us.”

“Is he in prison too?” Dana took a new tuft of hair, so much softer than she’d imagined it to be, and began plaiting.

“Nope. Because they said he didn’t do anything. But I’m going to be here for a whole month.”

Dana’s hands went still. “How do you know that?”

“Because that’s what the judge say.” She handed a scrap of ribbon over her shoulder. “You never did answer me. Did you kill a baby or not?”

No one had ever asked her so bluntly, nobody with any authority, anyway. Only the terrified children, and Mrs. Karistin when she was feeling especially menacing. To the children, she said no, so their fears would be assuaged; to Mrs. Karistin, she said nothing, so she’d have no satisfaction. But Carrie, she knew, would not be satisfied with either.

“I wouldn’t be here unless they thought I did.”

“But did you?”

She tied a small, red knot. “No. I don’t think so.”

Carrie made a low humming noise that made Dana feel, for the first time ever, that she might have a sympathetic ear, which disappeared quickly with her next question.

“Are they gonna hang you?”

“Why would you ask such a thing as that?”

“Because that’s what happens to killers. They say, ‘You shall hang from the neck until you are dead.’”

Dana swallowed, with each word imagining the feel of a rope. “I—I don’t think so.”

“Well, then, how long are you going to have to stay here?”

“Nobody ever said. How do you know all this?”

Carrie turned around fully, clearly frustrated with the conversation. “Weren’t you paying attention? At the end, the judge pounds his hammer, and he says, ‘I hereby sentence you to a month’s hard labor.’ Or ‘For this crime, you shall spend no fewer than five years in the correctional facility.’ Or ‘I sentence you to prison for the rest of your natural life.’” She delivered each sentence in a deep, authoritative voice. “You went before a judge, didn’t you?”