Mistaken Identity (28 page)

The news confounded her. It seemed astounding that the only inevitable fact should be profoundly inconceivable when it happened. Bewildering that an event Bennie had thought about, even planned for, should take her completely by surprise, especially given her mother’s illness. Her depression had been a lethal tug-of-war in which every day of life was a victory, and her mother had finally won.

Her mother had won freedom from a life of torment, of whispers in the night, of fears. Hers was an empty life, a hollow one. That was inconceivable, too. Life was supposed to be full of productive work and of simple pleasures; the laughter of children, the crunch of a fresh apple, the warmth of a soft blanket. Sharp pencils and good, thick books. Life wasn’t supposed to be dark with nightmares; brief interludes of clarity in a world of confusion, made blacker because its origins were so unjustified, and unjustifiable.

Bennie felt her throat constrict. It was unfair; unjust. It occurred to her, for the first time, that that’s what her own life had been about. A fight for justice where there wasn’t any. The urge to set things right when they had gone terribly wrong. Not in courtrooms, though that’s what Bennie had always thought until this very minute. Her life was about justice where it mattered. In life. In her mother’s life.

She sat still for one more minute, then got up, grabbed her handbag, and walked silently out of her office and through her law firm. She said not a word to anyone, just avoided their curious eyes, even Marshall’s, who had taken the doctor’s messages and probably guessed what had happened.

Bennie got into the elevator and traveled to the basement garage, then found her car keys in the bottom of her purse and chirped the Ford unlocked. She climbed into the truck, twisted on the ignition, and reversed out of the parking space. A red word lit up on the dashboard,
BRAKE
, and she yanked up the emergency brake. She acted on autopilot and the only thought in her head was a mild surprise at the number of acts it took to get out of the parking lot and to the hospital:

Insert monthly pass card in slot.

Drive out of garage.

Turn left onto Locust.

Cruise to the corner.

Stop at the red light.

So many tasks to perform, each one discrete and identifiable. Bennie set her mind to performing each task, in the logical order, and so survived the minutes after she learned her mother had passed from the face of this earth.

“She wasn’t alone,” Hattie sobbed, her coarse, dark cheeks streaked with tears.

Bennie hugged the nurse, holding her firmly, as if she could send strength through her very skin. Hattie had taken care of Bennie’s mother for a decade, had been at her side through all of the hospitalizations, the electro-shock, and the chemicals. And now this. Bennie, dry-eyed, was grateful to Hattie once again. Her mother hadn’t died alone.

“She suffered so much,” Hattie said, but Bennie couldn’t bear to hear that. She squeezed Hattie closer and buried her face in Hattie’s marcelled waves, bleached canary yellow. Her hair was stiff and perfumed from processing, but Bennie took comfort in it just the same.

“My poor baby,” Hattie murmured, and Bennie didn’t know Hattie had thought of her mother that way. Sobs wracked Hattie’s soft, heavy body, and she sagged in Bennie’s arms. Bennie walked her over to a chair, gentled her into it, and sat beside her. There was a closed door on the other side of the room. Her mother’s body was inside.

“I don’t know why they tellin’ me she was fine,” Hattie said, her tears turning to anger, then back again. Bennie squeezed her until her crying became hiccups and then sputtered to a wheezy stop. The room fell quiet, and Bennie found the silence somehow harder to take. The lump in her throat seemed to calcify. She imagined a plate of bone growing over her chest, shielding her heart from the outside world and sealing her emotions within.

“Are you the family?” interrupted a man’s voice, and Bennie turned and looked up. An oily-faced gentleman in a dark suit, with a small mustache and earnest eyes, looked puzzled at the hysterical black woman embraced by the businesslike blonde. “My name is James Covella, from Covella’s Funeral Home. Are you the family?”

“Yes,” Bennie answered, her voice thick.

“I’m sorry for your terrible loss. We’ve come for Mrs. Rosato,” he said. Discreetly behind him waited a collapsible metal gurney. The sight of it caught Bennie by the throat.

“Not yet,” she said firmly. “Not just yet.” She halted the man with a large, trembling hand, disentangled herself from Hattie, and rose to her feet to say good-bye. Only after she had slipped inside her mother’s room did she permit herself the luxury of breaking down.

A
lice didn’t know what came over her but she felt rammy all of a sudden. She couldn’t take it anymore. She had to get out. She had to be free. There was only one skinny window on the unit, and she looked out as she stood, her feet shifting back and forth in the lunch line. “Move up,” she said to the inmate in front of her, who obeyed.

Alice felt crazy. It must be the fucking house. It was getting to her today. She couldn’t figure out why. She inched forward in the line, trying to keep a lid on it. What the fuck was going on? She should have been feeling good; she was that morning when she met with Rosato, but sometime around lunch she got funky. Got a hinky feeling, like something bad was going down.

Alice laughed at herself. Fuck. Of course she was antsy. Something bad
was
going down. That thing with Shetrell. Somebody trying to whack her. Alice looked around for the eightieth time that morning. Shetrell and Leonia had already gotten their food, they were ahead of her where she could see them. They wouldn’t try anything at lunch anyway, in the open. Alice should have felt safe. But she didn’t.

She reached the front of the line and grabbed her floppy ham sandwich, strawberry yogurt, and canned fruit shit, and walked to the table where she always sat, farthest from the others. The tables were bolted to the floor on the common area of the unit, which was ringed by two tiers of cells, fifteen above and fifteen below; most of the bottom tier was double-celled for low-seniority inmates. Inmates spent every minute of every day with the same group of women, for decades.

Alice yanked out a steel chair with a back that said
PHILADELPHIA CIVIC CENTER
, for some reason. The floor was a washed-out blue-and-white linoleum and the walls were whiter than white, from slave labor. Alice had counted the tiles in the unit’s common area several hundred times. She’d come up with eighty-seven tiles each time.

She knew her cage by heart. She could close her eyes and point to where the TV was mounted, high so it couldn’t be destroyed. She could see in her sleep the handmade drawings the inmates taped up on the unit walls;
DISCIPLINE, TRUST, RESPECT
, read the Magic Marker captions. Stick figures held hands under hearts and flowers. Christ. Alice wanted to rip them off the wall.

Instead she sipped her coffee, feeling the stiff Band-Aid in the crook of her arm where her blood had been taken. So she’d had her bluff called. It was the only way to keep Rosato cool. The results wouldn’t be back until the trial was over. Alice would be long gone. She took a bite of sandwich and hunched over her tray, the way she always did, facing the window. She kept her back to the other tables and so didn’t see what was happening between Shetrell and Leonia.

Shetrell sat at the lunch table before her tray, her gaze on Leonia, who sat down in the only empty seat, on the other side of Taniece.
Shit.
Leonia was supposed to sit right next to Shetrell. What a fuckup. Taniece had taken Leonia’s seat. Bitch shouldn’ta sat in the way like that. Shoulda known better. “Who tol’ you you could sit here?” Shetrell snapped at Taniece.

Taniece looked over. “What I do?”

“Leonia always sit here. You not suppose to be sittin’ here.”

“I don’t have to ax your permission where I sit!”

“Hey!” shouted the guard, and Shetrell shut up. It was Dexter Raveway, Dexter the Pecker. He was a good-lookin’ brother but he knew it, standin’ behind the guard desk at the front of the room, scratchin’ his johnson half the time. She figured he had somethin’ goin’ with Taniece and that was why Taniece picked lunchtime to fuck with her. “Shetrell, that’s enough,” Dexter shouted. “Don’t be bossin’ everybody around, now.”

Shetrell slunk low in her chair. She couldn’t get another write-up, she’d end up in the hole.

“Hmph,” Taniece said, like a church lady, and Shetrell glared at Leonia, who nodded.

Shetrell had to think of something. Her eyes rested on her tray, then she spotted somethin’ move on the floor under the table, between everybody’s sneakers. A cockroach, a big fat brown mother, struttin’. She watched the roach hustle along the linoleum and stop at the table leg. Tryin’ to decide what to do. Whether to come up or not.

Come on, baby,
Shetrell was thinking.
Come to Mama.
She snagged a piece of bread from her tray and let her hand drop to her side, easy so it didn’t look like nothin’ was goin’ on. Maybe the roach would get the smell.
Come on, sugar. Mama gonna take care of you.
Shetrell watched the roach try to make up its little roach mind. He stopped like a married man, right at the edge. Couldn’t go no further.
Come on, baby.

The roach didn’t even have to think twice. It skittered up the table leg, and Shetrell dipped her shoulder, snatched it off, and closed it in her hand. She waited until Taniece turned away, then dropped the roach in the bitch’s strawberry yogurt.

“Shit! Shit!” Taniece shouted when she spotted a dark bulge moving on her plate. “There’s somethin’ in my food! A mouse! A rat! Shit!” She jumped up and shrieked like she was in a horror movie, and Shetrell woulda laughed her ass off if she hadn’t been so worried about gettin’ the shank to Leonia.

“A rat! A rat in the food! There’s a rat in my food!” Taniece yelled. Her chair fell over, then she stumbled backward and fell on top of it, while Breanna, next to her, leapt away from her tray, knocking into another girl. Shetrell watched everybody jump outta their seats. The white trash shook like they saw a steady job.

“Relax, relax, I’m on it,” Dexter the Pecker said, runnin’ over like Wesley Snipes to save the day.

Taniece was doin’ the freak. “It’s a rat, I saw it, it’s a rat! It’s in my motherfuckin’ yogurt!” she said, grabbing Dexter’s arm. “I was eatin’ that shit!”

Pussy,
Shetrell thought.
Get over yourself.

“Calm down, everybody, calm down,” Dexter said, but nobody was listening. “It’s just a roach, it’s not a rat.” He didn’t call any other guards, which was just fine with Shetrell. She edged back from the crowd, pretending to be afraid, and saw Leonia backing up, too, meeting her from the other direction. Now was her chance.

Shetrell bumped her way backward, slipped her hand into the elastic of her pants, and slid the shank out. Leonia stood next to Shetrell, grabbed the knife, and acted like she was falling down. Shetrell couldn’t see it, but she figured Leonia slipped the shank in her sneaker, under her pants leg. The girl was damn good. She used to snatch wallets at The Gallery.

“Did you get it?” Shetrell yelled, like she was callin’ to Dexter about the roach. Out the corner of her eye, she saw Leonia laughin’ and knew she got it, all right.

“It’s just a roach. It’s all taken care of,” Dexter said, holding Taniece’s tray high over the heads of the women, who were just starting to calm down.

“You better get me another lunch, I ain’t eatin’ that shit!” Taniece shouted. “I’m gonna
sue
this motherfuckin’ place!”

Alice turned in her seat to see what the commotion was all about, barely interested. A mouse in Taniece’s food. What a lovely hotel. She’d be gone in days. But it didn’t leave her much time to take care of Valencia. Alice took a final slug of coffee and crumpled her Styrofoam cup. She gathered her tray, the food unfinished, and walked through the tables to where Valencia was chattering with the other
chiquitas.
Valencia looked up, and Alice leaned down and whispered in her ear, “I heard something from my lawyer. Meet me after head count tonight. The guard will come to you. Don’t tell anybody or it won’t happen.”

“Than’ you so much,” Valencia said softly.

“You can thank me tonight,” Alice told her.

F
or Bennie the next few hours were a haze of acute pain mixed with the oddly mundane business of burying the dead. Tasks had to be performed, and she performed each one. She selected her mother’s casket, burial plot, and even last dress, of beige chiffon with tan pumps, with a minimum of tears. She found a valuable ally in the funeral director, with his moussed pompadour and professional smoothness, who scheduled her mother’s wake, funeral, and burial in a way that had a pat beginning, middle, and end. In death as in life.