Dear Daughter (34 page)

I snapped my fingers at her face. “Focus, Crystal. I don’t care about your conflicted teen-mom bullshit. I need to know who . . . who the father of Tessa’s kid was.”

“
She
probably didn’t know who the father was.”

Seriously
? Had no one in this town seen my mother for who she really was? My mother never even accepted a phone call without knowing who exactly was on the other end of the line.

“Then why did you tell Peter Strickland that it was Mitch?”

“An educated guess.”

I threw up my hands. “Well, is there anyone else who might know? Anyone Tessa was close to? Any . . . friends?”

Crystal gave me a look like I was a bird who’d flown into a window. “Haven’t you been paying attention? Tessa didn’t have any friends.”

•   •   •

So it turned out I had something in common with my mother after all: I didn’t have any friends, either. Well, unless you count Marciela.

You can probably guess that I didn’t spend much time around other kids when I was growing up, but before you start to feel sorry for me, let me assure you that even if my mother hadn’t insisted on it, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I never understand it when parents talk about sending their kids to school to “socialize” them. Children aren’t people. They’re barely even animals. They’re just suppurating wounds of emotion inflamed by too much positive reinforcement.

You can’t be socialized by the unsocializable. That’s like asking King Kong to teach tap dance.

I understood early on that it was the adults who were worth my time. Once, when I was five and we were still living in Geneva, I snuck out of the house while my mother was still sleeping things off and walked to a nearby playground.

There were a dozen kids there at least, most of them fighting for space on one of the various devices that move you back and forth between two static points like it’s some kind of a life lesson. I watched a boy in a blue-striped shirt grab a handful of wood chips and smash them in his playmate’s face. Another fell off a swing set and was then ignored by the other children, who ran to claim the empty seat. A little girl was crouching under a tree and shitting her pants.

I walked past them all, heading directly to the caregivers seated on the sidelines. I planted myself in front of the ugliest one, sweetened up my face with a Shirley Temple smile, and said, “You’re the most beautiful mommy I’ve ever seen.”

The woman gave me every single one of her kid’s snacks.

That’s
socialization.

By the time my peers were rational enough to hold my interest, I was in prison—which is where I met Marciela. She was the prison’s part-time librarian, and given how much time I spent in the library, she was probably the person I saw most frequently. But I didn’t really get to know her until I got kicked out of vocational training for defending myself in a fight. Once I got out of the hole I was sent to work in the library.

When I walked in that first morning, I found Marciela waiting for me, tapping her foot.

“What took you so long?”

“Busy social calendar.” (Translation: an encounter with a surly guard.)

Marciela took off her glasses before continuing, something I’d realize later was a sure sign she was about to feed me a fat line of bullshit. “Well, I have good news for you,” she said. “You’ve been assigned to work here with me.”

“What do you need me for?”

“The shelves are a mess.” She gestured to the far corner of the room, disapproval deepening the hollow at the base of her chin. I craned my neck so I could see the shelf she was pointing to: PR 161 to PR 488. English Literature: Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, and Modern. It looked as pristine as always. Ours wasn’t a large library, but even so, the only sections that saw any regular action were law and popular fiction, bibliothecal opiates of the hopeful and hopeless, respectively. There weren’t many of us who could be tempted to try
Daniel Deronda
, myself included.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

“The decision was made to remove you from the standard vocational and occupational training programs. Again.”

I didn’t say anything, determined to preserve the outward appearance of equanimity.

She put her glasses back on, blinking rapidly as her eyes readjusted to the lenses. “You’re lucky,” Marciela said. “They could’ve just kept you in the SHU. Don’t screw this up, stay out of trouble, and maybe you won’t have to go back.”

I thought of the tiny box where I’d been spending twenty-three hours of each day, of the voices that followed me in there.

“I’ll try,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Apart from my visits with Noah, it was the most amiable exchange I’d had in years.

Now this was not precisely the start to what I would call a beautiful friendship. We didn’t swap secrets or braid each other’s hair. She didn’t see something “special” in me, something no one had ever seen before. She was probably just being cautious, operating under the false assumption that I would be kinder to those who were kind to me.

But it was a friendship nevertheless. I’d like to think we were happy to see each other, and even though we only talked about literature, we made each other laugh. When I was on my own for too long, it was her face that kept me from wearing out my memory of Noah’s. And in the end, there was nothing I wanted from her except the assurance that I was making her life marginally better instead of infinitely worse, and doesn’t that mean something?

Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe friendship is just something two people arbitrarily decide on together, like the right way to spell worshiper or when it’s okay to say
cunt
. Maybe we just grab whatever raft’s at hand.

When I got back to the lobby, I marched right up to Kelley and Renee.

“Can we get the fuck out of here?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” they said.

I was utterly unable to hide my look of surprise—and pleasure.

CBS News
—
Below is a transcript of the
48 Hours
special report:
Janie Jenkins, Ten Years Later,
which aired on July 14, 2013, and was hosted by Monica Leahy. Guests included: Ainsley Butler, Det. Greg Johnson, and Marciela Rosales.

LEAHY: Now, Ms. Rosales, you supervised Ms. Jenkins in the prison library for three years, from 2010 to 2013, is that correct?

ROSALES: On and off, yes.

LEAHY: What do you mean when you say “on and off”?

ROSALES: Jane had a habit of getting herself into trouble. Fighting, mouthing off, that sort of thing. She wasn’t always allowed to spend time in the library.

LEAHY: So she wasn’t exactly a model prisoner.

ROSALES: Far from it.

LEAHY: How would you describe Ms. Jenkins?

ROSALES: On her good days, she was pleasant. She was a bright girl, and she could work hard if she wanted to. She liked to read, which was a nice surprise.

LEAHY: And on her bad days?

ROSALES: Occasionally the world was a bit too much for her. Sometimes she would sit listlessly in a chair, sometimes I’d find her huddled in a corner. Other times she’d rearrange the books. She’d put them in reverse alphabetical order, chronological order, rainbow order. Usually I couldn’t even figure out what her system was. But she always had a system, I can tell you that.

LEAHY: What was her favorite book, do you know?

ROSALES: I don’t know if Jane can be said to have had a favorite anything, but she read widely—science, history, cosmetology.

LEAHY: And did she ever speak to you about her mother’s murder?

ROSALES: No, of course not. We didn’t talk about anything personal. I mean—it’s not like we were friends.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Coyote Hole was only half full, but when we sat down, Tanner wouldn’t even look our way.

Renee smacked a hand on the bar. “Tanner. If you don’t serve us right now, so help me God, I will tell your mother about the time you fingered Marcia Sinclair during Sunday service.”

“Don’t be like that, Renee. It was the Christian thing to do.”

“You’re a pig,” she said. “Now give us whiskey. And don’t let Kelley talk you out of it.”

Tanner reached for the Jim Beam.

“No,” I said.

“Excuse me?” he said slowly.

“We’ll have what he’s having.” I pointed to an old man at the far end of the bar. He wore a clerical collar and had a Rudolph-red nose of broken capillaries.

Tanner’s hand was still stretched toward the Jim Beam, but when I refused to back down or even to break eye contact, he gave in and pulled down a bottle of something called Rittenhouse Rye.

Renee grinned. “Line ’em up, Chief. Neat.”

“No way,” Kelley said. “Rocks. Lots of rocks.”

“Killjoy,” Renee said.

He set three glasses out in front of us and left the bottle. Renee lifted her drink high in the air.

“To this week almost being over!”

I hurled the liquor down my throat. I had to put one hand on the bar for balance. The rye packed a wallop, and I’d forgotten how to roll with it.

Dutch Courage acquired, I turned to look at Kelley and Renee. “So I’ve decided we should be friends,” I said. “How do we do that?”

Renee laughed. “You’re asking the wrong person. I have one friend, and she’s sitting right next to me.”

“Don’t listen to her. Renee likes to think she’s a hard-ass, but she’s a big softie.”

I nodded, already feeling the warmth of the liquor. It lanced through me like one of Kelley’s smiles. “Girl talk,” I said. “That’s where we should start, right?”

“Is that where we talk about sex and boys?” Renee said.

“Oh, I can totally do that!” Kelley said.

Renee raised her eyebrows.

“Like, okay,” Kelley said, “so in
Buffy
season seven—”

Renee put her hand over Kelley’s mouth. “Nope.”

Kelley pulled Renee’s hand away, giving it a little squeeze before letting go.

“Okay, so you guys are friends,” I said. “What do you talk about when you’re together?”

Renee smirked; Kelley smacked her. “We talk about other things too,” she said. “Smart, important, smart things. Like . . . the news?”

I thought of all the news alerts my disabled phone hadn’t been getting. “I’ve kind of fallen behind on that.”

“Politics?” Renee said. “Movies? Benedict Cumberbatch?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

“Stupid shit people said on the Internet?”

“I’ve got nothing,” I said.

Kelley held up a finger, waiting until she had our full attention. “Our mothers,” she said.

I finished off my drink and poured myself another.

“That,” I said, “I think I can do.”

Renee groaned. “Oh, god, do we have to?”

“I’ll start, since I have the nice mom,” Kelley said. “Last night my mother called to make sure I knew that the
New York Times
had published an article about a link between eating soy and a reduced risk of breast cancer, and that she’d send me a check if I would please go to the grocery story and stock up on soy milk. Please note that before she moved to Florida she’d never even heard of soy milk.”

“I have the strict mom,” said Renee. “The last time she came over, she went through my closet and pulled out all the clothes she thought were ‘inappropriate’ for a woman of my ‘professional stature.’ Then she told me that she couldn’t believe someone my age still hadn’t learned how to use an iron.”

They looked at me expectantly. What was I supposed to say that wouldn’t ruin the conversation? That once my mother locked herself in her room for a week because she’d actually tried cooking dinner and I’d refused to eat the haricots verts? That once my mother drank a fifth of whiskey and told me that she wished she’d never met my father, and when I’d reminded her that then I would never have been born, she’d waved me off and said, “Of course you’d think it’s all about you.” That once my mother kept me confined for three years to a drafty house in Neuchâtel, with nothing to keep me company but a parade of priggish tutors and the nineteenth-century pornography collection the house’s previous owner had left behind. She hadn’t even let me have a—

“My mother wouldn’t let me have a TV,” I said. “And we never, ever went to the movies. So I didn’t know anything about anything other than decorative arts and etiquette until I was, like, fifteen. I basically lived in an Edith Wharton novel.”

“Did you get to wear bustles?” Kelley asked.

“I bet she didn’t let you have potato chips or sugar cereal, either,” Renee said.

“I did have to eat a lot of muesli.” I took a drink. “It was kind of a strange childhood—but yours must have been, too, right? I mean, growing up here?”

“It was different for those of us who were over in Adeline,” Renee said. “That place really is just such a shit hole. But, for better or for worse, it’s
our
shit hole.”

Kelley cleared her throat.

“Okay, fine, it’s our
stolen
shit hole. But either way . . . it has a hold on us, I guess. Like, it’s not a house or a car or something that can go away, you know? There’s some
there
there.” She took a drink. “Oh what the fuck do I know, maybe it’s some dumb cultural thing we’ve been tricked into, like high heels. It was just constantly drummed into us as kids, like ‘This is your legacy, show some respect!’”

“If that was your legacy why’d you move to Ardelle?”

Renee smiled. “They shut off the utilities.”

I fiddled with my cocktail stirrer. “The longest I ever lived in one place was—” I pulled up, frowned. “Ten years.”

“That’s long enough to miss a place.”

I thought of that morning with Jared at the county jail, how as soon as I stepped through the door I’d felt like I was swimming in saline instead of chlorine. Back inside those walls, my body floated with so much less effort. “Yes,” I said. “Sometimes I miss it.”