Juvie (26 page)

Bad Gina and I sit in adjacent stalls, and she starts chattering right away.

“Wouldn’t it be so cool to ride those Jet Skis?” she asks. “I haven’t done that in forever. You ever ride a Jet Ski? I’d like to try this thing I’ve seen people do where you push the nose down and you actually go underwater and then pop out, like a whale or something.”

I’ve actually been thinking about those Jet Skis myself — that if Lake Anna wasn’t so junky and polluted, and if it wasn’t for those nuclear reactors, this might be a fun place to come back to sometime. Kevin would love doing something like that. Carla used to love doing stuff like that, too. I think I might tell her about it if I get the chance to call tonight. I bet Lulu would like it, too.

Bad Gina finishes before I do. I hear water running but don’t hear her leave.

When I finally come out of my stall, she’s still there, leaning against her sink.

“Hey, Sadie,” she says. “Check this out.” She points to a second door out of the back of the restroom, on the opposite side from the pavilion. “We could walk right out of here. Cut through those woods.”

“And go where?” We’re miles from the nearest highway.

She grins. “Mexico. I told you I’m going.”

“Right,” I say. “And how are we getting there?”

She keeps grinning. “There are ways.”

I wash my hands. “No, thanks. I like it in juvie too much. I’d hate to miss out on any of my time there.”

“Whatever,” she says, still leaning on her sink.

“Why don’t you bring New Nikki?” I say. “You guys seem to get along pretty well.”

“She’s all right,” Bad Gina says. “Just kind of young.”

“She doesn’t sound too young. Didn’t she say she stabbed a girl?”

Bad Gina rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, who hasn’t?”

We work in silence the rest of the afternoon, except for Good Gina, who whistles a lot even though she can’t carry a tune. As the afternoon wears on, we wander farther apart on the beach, each of us carving our separate, meandering little paths through all the garbage.

C. Miller comes down to join me at the water’s edge.

“Pretty warm out for December,” she says, squinting up into that high blue sky.

“It’s not too bad once you’ve been out in it for a while,” I say. “You’re just coming from the shade. Cooler up there.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she says. “Anyway, you doing OK?”

“Sure,” I say. “It’s nice to be outside.” I lean on my trash grabber and survey the quiet lake and the verdant tree line. I always liked that word —
verdant
. Dad is the only person I’ve ever heard actually say it. He was always a good one for using uncommon words.

“So,” C. Miller says. “That sister of yours.”

“Yeah?” My throat closes up a little. I both want to hear this and don’t.

“We got together like I told you, with Lulu and LaNisha. We met at that park in town, with the tennis courts.”

“And?” I press, gripping my trash grabber. “How did it go? How’d she look? How was Lulu?”

C. Miller laughs. “Lulu was great. She and LaNisha decided they were best friends after about a minute. And Carla seemed OK, too. I don’t really know her that well, but she was different from how I’d seen her at Friendly’s. She was dressed a whole lot better. And she didn’t look so tired or so skinny, either. Maybe because of what she was wearing. Or maybe she’s taking better care of herself lately.”

I let go of the breath I hadn’t known I was holding and stare out at the water. “Thank you,” I say, glancing back at C. Miller. “Really, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you checking up on her for me.”

C. Miller smiles. “Like I said, it was nice to meet another single mom my age.” She hesitates, and I tense up again. I knew this sounded too good to be true.

“She asked if she could use me for a reference at Victoria’s Secret. She knows somebody who works there, but they aren’t sure about hiring her because of her record. She thought it might help to have me, since I work corrections.”

“What did you say?”

“Told her I couldn’t.”

“Oh.”

C. Miller kicks at something buried in the sand. It turns out to be a beer bottle. Heineken. “It’s not my job to save your sister,” she says. “That’s not anybody’s job but Carla’s. I can maybe be her friend, but that’s all.”

I pick up the Heineken and stuff it in my trash bag. “So she’s stuck at Friendly’s. With all her druggie pals that work there.”

“At least she’s trying,” C. Miller says. “You have to give her some credit for that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”

I thank her again for checking on Carla. C. Miller says don’t mention it.

Officer Killduff yells down to her to line us up and head back to the juvie van. It’s time to go. C. Miller and I survey the beach, which is still covered with trash.

I hate the thought of leaving. Probably everybody else does, too. Bad Gina curses and empties her trash bag into the Dumpster.

C. Miller tells me not to worry, we’re supposed to come back tomorrow.

I call Mom that evening. Lulu gets on the phone first and tells me she’s painting Moo-Moo’s toenails.

“She’s letting you use nail polish?” I’m afraid I’ll break down, it’s so sweet to hear her voice — the same as it’s always been.

“No,” she says. “Not with polish. With a paintbrush.”

“And paint?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What color?”

“Blue.”

“Just her toenails?”

“Her whole feet, too.”

“So Moo-Moo has blue feet now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That sounds really pretty,” I say, swallowing hard.

“Aunt Sadie?”

“Yeah?”

“When you coming home?”

Mom takes the phone from her then. I can hear her tell Lulu that that’s enough for one night, and she needs to go on and wash her hands real good in the sink. I want to ask Mom how Carla is doing, if it’s as good as C. Miller made it out to be. But then I decide if it’s not, I don’t want to know about it. Not tonight, anyway. It’s been too nice a day to risk ruining with bad news about Carla. So instead I ask Mom about her cousin, since she’d told me she was planning to drive up to Delaware for a quick visit. Mom says they think they caught the cancer early, so her cousin is pretty optimistic.

“And what about Dave?” I ask. “Did you go out with Dave?”

She sighs. “I don’t know why I told you about that.”

“So?”

“So I’m not saying one way or the other.”

I laugh, surprised that I’m relaxed about this. “That means yes, right?”

She laughs, too. It’s nice to hear. “It means I’m not saying.”

I hang up, still feeling good about things. Then I hear Good Gina, at the next phone, once again pretending to talk to her boyfriend who she shot, loud enough so I can hear: “Oh, I miss you, baby. I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait until we’re together again. I’m going to be the best girlfriend ever once I get out of here, and I mean that.”

New Nikki is on the third phone, and by the looks of things, she’s having phone sex or something close to it, whispering in a low, raspy bedroom voice, practically humping the wall until one of the guards sees what’s going on and makes her hang up. Her face is still flushed when she sits down at one of the tables. Bad Gina asks if she needs a cigarette, and New Nikki blushes an even deeper shade of red.

I sit with Fefu and Kerry.

“Wow,” says Kerry, nodding at New Nikki. “Did you see that?”

I nod. “Yeah. Quite a show.”

Bad Gina stands up to use one of the free phones, and we all watch her for some reason, as if we think she might pick up where New Nikki left off. She doesn’t. She gets into a heated conversation with somebody instead, though I can’t make out what they’re saying. She never takes her eyes off the guards and stops talking anytime one of them wanders over close enough to hear the conversation.

Fefu, too, gets into an argument with somebody over the phone, not bothering to keep it quiet, but since it’s in Spanish I don’t know what it’s about. She’s still worked up when we get back to Unit Three. She opens a Candy Land board and stacks the cards facedown and sets up the spinner and the game pieces. She must have played before, and judging from the defiant look she has — teeth bared, eyebrows knitted together — she’s clearly ready to kick my butt or anybody else’s.

I make sure to let her.

I stayed in bed all day Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday the weekend before turning myself in to juvie. I probably should have made better use of my last days of freedom — spent the night on Government Island, taken Lulu to the zoo in DC, stuff like that — but I couldn’t seem to make myself get out of bed no matter how hard I tried.

Carla came over, and I let her in long enough to tell her to just keep her mouth shut. “If you confess now, nobody’s going to believe you,” I said. “Or if they do, you go to jail, and where does that leave Lulu? And I’ll still be in juvie because I already confessed and they won’t let me take it back.”

“How do you know?” she asked. It sounded like she was begging for something.

“Any idiot can see it,” I said, my jaw clenched so tight I thought I might break some teeth. Carla started crying, and I told her to leave.

Sunday afternoon Mom made me open the door. She brought in a grilled-cheese sandwich and some tomato soup on a TV tray. “Sit up. Here. You have to eat.”

I took a few slow, careful bites. I wasn’t even a little hungry, though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast on Thursday, before the sentencing. I worried that if I ate too much or too fast, I might throw up.

Mom sat on the floor and leaned against the wall and watched me. “Last time I’m asking,” she said.

“What?”

“Did it happen the way you said, or not?”

I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. She must have known everything was Carla’s fault, but what good would come from changing my story now? All it would do was confirm Mom’s reason for being furious at Carla. And if my going to juvie was going to mean anything, I needed Mom to be there for Carla, not to punish her.

I didn’t answer her question and she didn’t ask it again. We just sat there together for a while until she told me to get up and come on — we were going to the cemetery.

Eternal Rest sits on rolling hills west of town. It’s kind of a dumpy cemetery, but I suppose in the end those things don’t really matter.

Something was happening when we arrived. There were four sheriff’s cruisers and an ambulance parked by what looked like a backhoe lying on its side next to a fresh grave.

Mom parked as far away as she could. A groundskeeper walked past.

“Accident?” Mom asked.

He shook his head. “Fellow come out here little while ago, tried to dig up where his little boy just been buried. Stole that backhoe out of the shed over there. Turned it over in a ditch.”

“That’s terrible,” Mom said.

“Terrible to lose your child,” the groundskeeper said.

Mom and I just looked at each other.

We hadn’t been to the cemetery since Granny’s funeral, nearly three years ago, but Mom was acting like it was an old habit, something we did on Sunday afternoons. She got down on her knees and pulled out some weeds from around Granny’s headstone. I knelt down to help her, brushing off dried bird poop and tracing Granny’s name with my finger. I still couldn’t figure out why we were there. Mom and Granny had always gotten along well, but Granny was Dad’s mother, not Mom’s.

When all the weeds were gone, and the bird poop, Mom wandered off and left me alone. I sat on the brown grass and leaned against the headstone.

The last time I’d seen Granny was at the hospital when she was in respiratory failure. She had already said good-bye to Mom and Carla, and now it was my turn. I was alone with her in the room, and she pulled me so close I was practically lying next to her on the bed. She said there was something important I needed to know. She said I should always remember that life is hard for people like my dad, but that for people like her and me, it’s pretty simple.

She pulled me even closer so she could whisper, like it was a big secret between just the two of us.

“You wake up every morning,” she said, “no matter what happened the day before, and you tell yourself you’re going to do good.”

I waited for more.

“That’s it, Granny?”

She nodded. “That’s it.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I told her how much I loved her and she told me how much she loved me, too.

“Can you send your daddy in here now, sweetheart?” she whispered slowly, her voice fading.

I hesitated a second, and then said, “I will, Granny. I’ll go get him right now.” Only I couldn’t. She’d forgotten that Dad wasn’t at the hospital. Even with his mom dying, he couldn’t make himself leave her house and come.

I went out in the hall with Mom and Carla and Lulu, who was just a baby then. I told Mom about Granny’s request, but when she went back in to explain, Granny was gone.

Mom patted Granny’s thin, frail hand, then left to find the nurse. Carla sat in a chair and cried and gave Lulu a bottle. I lay in bed next to Granny again and closed my eyes and held on to her until Mom and the nurse came back and said it was time to let her go.

After half an hour or so, I left Granny’s grave to find Mom. She was sitting under an elm near where the guy wrecked the backhoe, and she was talking to somebody who I quickly realized was the guy. The sheriffs were gone, but the backhoe still sat on its side in the ditch. They were going to need a couple of tow trucks to haul it out.