Tuesday Night Miracles (41 page)

“You remember what you want to remember, sweetheart,” her mother told her. “You were the apple of your father’s eye. Your brothers were hard on you because they were jealous.”

Was that true? Were her long-held feelings that drove her anger like imaginary friends who really didn’t exist?

“I miss her so much most days it’s a wonder I can breathe, Leah,” Kit finally admits. “I like to think I appreciated her and was a good daughter before she got ill, too, but these past few months with Dr. Bayer have made me wonder if half my life hasn’t been filled with self-deception.”

“I doubt that,” Grace says.

“I’m so excited about moving forward, though, and it’s going to look so different! She’s right about moving forward. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, about holding on to the wrong things, about being happy … just being happy.”

Kit hesitates. Her quivering voice was giving her away.

“You okay over there?” Grace asks.

“Oh sure,” Kit lies. “I’m not sad or anything—I’m just, well, I guess I’m emotional.”

“I think it’s important to be realistic, too.” Leah sounds as if she’s a million miles away. “I mean, I have a good day and then I hope I can hang on and make them all good days.”

“Forgiveness is a tough thing, it seems,” Grace adds. “I have to say, though, the more I do it the better I feel. I invited my daughter and her girlfriend for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“That’s nice,” Kit says.

“My daughter’s girlfriend, as in the
L Word
kind of girlfriend.”

“You mean lesbian?” Leah asks, having absolutely no clue about the infamous television series called
The L Word
.

“Yep.”

“Good for you!” Kit says.

“Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with the guy at work who has been trying to ask me out since forever, the daughter’s ex-boyfriend who hates me, probably half the neighbors, everyone at work, and three-fourths of the population of Chicago,” Grace continues, laughing again. “I figure by the time I’m pushing sixty I should have reconciled with everyone.”

There’s more laughter until Leah asks them if they think she should try to contact her mother.

Both Kit and Grace have to think a moment. They decide that this is no time not to be honest.

“I’d be pissed,” Kit says loudly. “She abandoned you.”

“I agree,” Grace adds. “Maybe you should wait a while. Get on your feet. Then see what your heart says.”

“I’ve been thinking that maybe she was afraid. There has to be something I don’t know about her life, and what if she needs me?”

Oh, Leah!

All three of them would give anything to be able to look at one another. Kit would love to put her arms around Leah, who must have been pining for her mother since the day she left home. Even in her darkest days with her daughters, Grace can’t imagine ever distancing herself, not seeing them, not lunging for the phone if she thinks they might be calling her.

What happened to Leah seems unforgivable to them, even as they realize that Leah must know now more than ever about the heavy pull of a mother’s love. Did Leah’s mother try? Is she even still alive? What in God’s name could she say to Leah after all these years? Could she even look her in the eye?

“Leah, if it were me I would just wait,” Grace tells her, turning her head as if she can actually see Leah. “I know it’s been a heartache for you but get on your feet, get the diploma you want, learn how to make all those days good days. Then see how you feel.”

Leah is quiet. Grace and Kit are probably right, but she hasn’t stopped thinking of her mother all these years. It’s so very odd that every memory of her is sweet and lovely. Leah knows that’s because she chooses to remember her that way. Maybe that’s how she should leave it. Maybe they’re right. If only she could stop thinking about her.

The wind is picking up outside, and all three of them can see the snow coming down in sheets. It’s absolutely beautiful the way a tiny window can function as a picture frame. There must be streetlights swaying close to the building that occasionally illuminate the windows, so that it looks as if someone is shining a light on them.

The quiet is something they all concentrate on when they’re not talking. There isn’t even the rumble of what they imagine is a grand old oil-burning furnace pumping in the basement. The building is so solid that there are no creaking sounds. There’s traffic coming and going, the wind brushing against the small windows, and they can hear one another breathing.

Surely it would not be like this if they were here under different circumstances. The cells would be full. There would be constant noise. Arguing. Talking. People coming and going. It would be hell, or close to it.

They also imagine who has been in the cell before them. The building probably dates back to the early 1920s and developers must be drooling to get their hands on it and sell the high ceilings, oak floors, solid structure, and its storied history. There’s even a chance that Al Capone spent more than one night here.

The beds are against the back wall in all three cells, which are identical. There’s a toilet at what any sane person would use as the foot of the bed, and it’s screened from the cell across from it by a huge metal sink. The thick brown walls are cracked at the top and appear to be solid concrete.

Leah places her ear against the wall to her right, thinking that perhaps voices were trapped inside the last time the place was painted.

“Who do you two think stayed in these cells?” she asks, keeping her ear to the wall.

Both Kit and Grace reach out to touch one of the walls. They are cold, and whatever traces of life were left have long since been painted over, scrubbed off, erased.

“It’s a county and not a federal facility, but it could have been everyone from murderers and rapists to other women like us, who got angry and went nuts.” This from Kit, who is more worried at this moment about her own history.

“I think they stopped using this back in the sixties,” Grace says. “I suppose they filled it up with Vietnam and civil-rights protesters before that. It’s Chicago. It could have been mobsters, gangsters, you name it.”

Leah is thinking about all the women before them who never got a chance. In many ways, she knows it was easier to get away with violence thirty, forty, or fifty years ago. Husbands and wives smacked their children all the time. Teachers smacked children. Women are still second-class citizens in areas like the small town where she grew up. There are generations of damaged men and women who were, and are, in many ways no different from the three of them.

She tells the women that sometimes she feels the burden of all the sorrow and sadness that has gone before her, trapped in the hearts of so many other women, so that it feels as if her heart is going to burst.

Kit and Grace are speechless. Their faces are pressed so tightly against the bars that it will take hours for the imprint to fade.

Sometimes when she sleeps, Leah tells them, she feels as if she were moving through clouds and going back in time and watching other women who had it worse. Some of them didn’t survive. Some tried to leave. Some of them left their children behind. Some of them got angry later, when it was too late and there was nothing left.

They run so fast, Leah says, and sometimes they fall and she can see them flying through the air in blue and white dresses, long skirts, bonnets, clothes worn so thin that when they pass by she can see right through them. The women are hollow. There is nothing there.

“I know I’m dreaming about myself. I know it, but all those women before us, sometimes it overwhelms me.”

Grace and Kit know the women Leah are talking about. Grandmothers, great-aunts, great-great-aunts, and women everywhere—generations of women who never bothered to get angry because they had no choice. Women who were beaten and used and worked so that they could get up and do it all over again. Amelia Earharts who weren’t allowed to fly. Pearl Bucks who weren’t allowed to write. Marie Curies who weren’t allowed in the lab. Indira Gandhis who weren’t allowed to lead. Ella Fitzgeralds who weren’t allowed to sing. Babe Didrikson Zahariases who weren’t allowed to run.

This is when all three of the women grasp how lucky they are to be right where they are at this moment.

They have struggled but tried, and they have attended class and have spent time thinking. They have shadowed Dr. Bayer’s rules and played the game, but this moment, heads on steel bars, hands on concrete walls, locked into rooms formerly inhabited by career criminals and so many drug dealers they once housed eight to a cell, they truly understand the chance they have been given.

And the chance so many others never had.

“The other thing,” Leah finally says, “is that my dreams have been changing. I suppose because I’m changing and I see the possibilities of life and happiness now in ways that make me want to get there, you know, every day.”

The women stand in their newfound revelations, unmoving, unspeaking for such a long time that Dr. Bayer worries. Surely they haven’t fallen asleep.

The jail is so quiet the women can hear Dr. Bayer’s tennis shoes when her feet hit the floor and she begins walking toward them. Her footsteps sound like the pitter-patter of a small child.

“Is everything okay in there?” she asks, approaching the women’s cells.

“Yes,” Grace answers.

“You sure?”

“I can’t see anyone, but we had a long talk and we’ve been thinking like you told us to.”

“Can I please hear from voice number two and voice number three?”

“I’m fine,” Kit says.

“Me, too,” Leah adds in a very loud whisper.

Dr. Bayer is onto them. They’ve been thinking, and they sound a bit emotional. Well, well, well. This is excellent!

“All good, then. Talk among yourselves. Or think among yourselves. I will see you in the morning.”

Before she turns to leave, Kit blurts out, “Are there any ghosts in here?”

Dr. Bayer chuckles to herself. “Do you really want to know the answer to that before I turn off the hall light?”

“Oh, my God!” Grace blurts. “I bet there’s been murders and stuff inside the jail.”

Leah is laughing, and Kit does a fake scream.

Dr. Bayer flips off the main lights and a small floor light goes on immediately that instantly turning the cells into a kind of Halloween-night blackness that is a bit disconcerting until their eyes get used to it.

“Shit!” Kit says, still clinging to the bars. “What was I thinking?”

“Just don’t get angry,” Leah advises, setting off another wave of laughter that confounds Dr. Bayer yet again.

Eventually all three of them tire of standing and experiment with talking to one another while lying on their bunks. Not only can they still communicate; the horizontal view of the cell gives them a new perspective.

They talk about love, lust, children, dreams, yearnings, and the parallel lives of angry women. It stops snowing, and they keep talking. Traffic totally evaporates, and they keep talking. The darkest part of the night arrives, and they keep talking.

Maybe the concrete walls make them bolder. Maybe the way they have now grasped their second chance makes them all new women. Maybe being in jail opens their hearts wider. They talk so long that their voices grow weak, and then they talk some more and share new ideas that astound each one of them as the words come out of their mouths.

Not so many hours before daylight, the women remember to get out the pictures they drew for the fourth assignment. There’s no way to pass them to one another, so they take turns describing what they’ve drawn.

Kit has used the acceptable stickmen to depict her and her husband sitting on a new back deck with glasses in their hands. In the sky their daughter is leaning out of a biplane, and waving as she flies past. She used crayons, all bright colors, and there are unopened gift-wrapped boxes everywhere.

“I started doing this and realized that I could keep drawing forever,” Kit said, holding up her drawing through the bars so that maybe one of the others can see part of it, which they can’t. “That’s when I put in all the unopened presents—you know, gifts of life that are being worked on but aren’t quite ready to be opened.”

Grace used pencils to make her drawing and said that if she had more time, like a year, she’d do hers in needlepoint. She is waving to the world from the top floor of an apartment building near downtown Chicago. There’s a man holding open the door below her, and a long line of visitors coming in to see her, and they’re all holding something bright and shiny—balloons, flowers, gifts. In the background there’s a tiny slice of Lake Michigan, a sign on the building that says
CONGRATS! NURSE-MOTHER-FRIEND-OF-THE-YEAR
, and all the important people in her life are coming to her housewarming party.

“You can’t see, but I’m also very thin, I’m holding a champagne glass and three plane tickets to take my daughters to the ocean.” Grace giggles as she looks at her picture. “The reason I’m laughing is because now I believe, with all my heart, that the drawing can become a reality. I’m going to make every damn thing in this drawing become real.”

Leah and Kit holler, “You go, girl!”

Leah says she’s pretty certain she’s not going to be a grade-school art teacher. “I feel the same as both of you,” she begins. “Once I sat down and started focusing on all my dreams, what my life can be like now, it was as if the world had exploded and all the pieces fell into my hands.”

So that’s what she drew. Her hands, with perfectly sculpted fingernails, holding everything—her smiling children, a diploma, a beautiful house, airplane tickets, bicycles, rainbows, a dog. And there were words sprinkled all over the paper, too:
Happiness. Freedom. Choices. Gentleness
.

“Everything that is important to me,” Leah says. “Pretty much I want it all!”

In the morning, when Dr. Bayer’s alarm goes off at 6:45, she freshens up, calls a cab, and then walks down the hall. She is absolutely amazed that all three of the women are sound asleep. She can’t remember anyone ever being asleep when she came to release them. It would be just her luck that they would’ve have died in their sleep.