Solemn (36 page)

“And not be scared 'bout nothin'. Not even being in here.”

“'Specially not being in here.”

“I ain't scared of none of these motherfuckers.”

“Shit, I ain't either. If I wasn't in here, they meet on my block, man … damn…”

“Settle down, ladies,” Dr. Givens cautioned.

“You said we could say what we wanted to say.”

“That's true, Majority,” Dr. Givens said. “But we have rules here. I want you to be honest, but I expect you to conduct yourselves like young ladies getting ready to meet young gentlemen.”

“Ain't nobody ever called me no lady. Shit.”

“What's gentlemen?”

Juice, pretzels, licorice, and sometimes freeze pops placated them for their ninety minutes. Part sound-off, part counseling, part theatrics, part expression, all mandatory.

“Solemn,” Dr. Givens started, “you have anything to add to our discussion on freedom, and what it means to you?”

“No,” Solemn muttered. She wiped her glasses with her shirt.

“What about how you plan to spend your time when you leave Fanny O. Barnes? What are your plans? I know you have a family. Have you discussed them?”

Shit if I got plans I ain't gonna share 'em with y'all. Girls with burning coal for eyes and foul mouths. What if I had run away in Cleveland? That freedom?

“What was that, Solemn?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you have to have some answers, thoughts about life beyond here, Solemn.”

“No.”

“Man, would this girl come on and say sumthin'? I'm tired of sittin' in here…”

“If she don't wanna say nothin', why she gotta say sumthin'?”

“Uhhhh … I was not talkin' to you.”

“Bitch I'm talkin' to you.”

“Damn would all y'all shut the fuck up?”

“What's for supper?”

“They got Polish sausages tonight.”

“Ooh, yeah.”

“I did not tell nobody they was dismissed yet!” Dr. Givens shouted.

Miss Ruth knocked on the door. Supper was ready. It was a notice second-bested only by the call for meds. Without a proper dismissal, the girls scrambled to their feet and out the door. Majority was first. Solemn was last. Dr. Givens caught her.

“Miss Redvine,” she said, “please produce an essay on freedom by the next group. Or you'll have points. Leave it with Miss Bernadine. She'll make sure I get it.”

Dr. Givens waited to hear what she always did from Solemn. That one word, crisp and untelling. She heard nothing. Solemn only yanked away from her, to supper.

*   *   *

A few hatboxes tipped off top of the file cabinets and it was pissing Miss Bernadine off. As they did with regularity, another package from Bledsoe arrived. Once Miss Bernadine checked them for contraband, as cold medicine and Tylenol were, they belonged to Solemn. The hatboxes carried the scent of her home straight to Solemn's head. The scent had no name and no comparison. It had scenes of days spent fiddling with Barbie dolls, or at the FM dial for a stubborn response, or forks against stoneware plates, and even a distinct smell to the Bledsoe mist. And the cat, Dandy.

Majority enjoyed the heartfelt menagerie more than Solemn did. Majority's only interest was money in her commissary and its exact accounting for at all times. Both the same size, Majority tackled Solemn's new wardrobe just as Solemn suspected she might.

Redvine and Bev took the bus up from Bledsoe after two months. Alice Taylor gave Redvine and Bev a ride from Singer's to the Kosciusko bus depot around 8:00 a.m. She would be back later in the evening, around 11:00, to pick them up. This way, the couple did not have to spare for a hotel. They had depended on cabs to await them, but they were mistaken. Visiting hours began at three o'clock. Solemn sat in the outdoor Family Area of Fanny's, in the open with curled moonflowers at her feet. Her folks would not arrive until 4:16, after another rider was persuaded to ask about their lingering and then offer them a ride to Fanny O. Barnes, past multiple golf courses. The rider asked no questions about the person they were to visit. Or why. Miss Bernadine directed them to a local car service to arrive at 6:00 for the five-dollar ride back to the bus station.

Their daughter had gained thankful weight as well as an estimable inch. Bev took note for the next time she sleptwalk around Walmart, Goody's, or Super Ten, to size up her daughter's ever-changing size. Redvine stood with a collection of DVDs under his arms and a basket of pretty-smelling potpourri, candles, and soap. Solemn sat prepared with the unchallenging projects she was given along with the others: figures made with Popsicle sticks wound with yarn, fingerpaints, magazine cutout collages, self-portraits in pencil, unoriginal poetry. From their room's window facing the back, Majority watched. She had never once had any visitors arrive all the way from Chicago.

As if it were a festival, Bev had uncovered and ironed the gingham picnic cloths to wrap inside the thatched basket, where she placed baked butcher ham sandwiches, macaroni salad wrapped in a plastic bowl in melted ice, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and warm grape pops. Redvine smoked Kools and watched the ladies eat. Bev started their talk.

“You made any friends in here?”

“No.”

“Not one?” She noticed her parting gift: her cross at Solemn's neck.

“I don't want to hang around these people,” her daughter said.

“How's the school lessons?”

“Easy.”

Redvine excused himself to walk among the flowers. Some years had passed, possibly a decade or more, since he brought home bouquets for his wife. He had relaxed at bringing home a paycheck, a guard, security, necessities, “things.” And still, with his shortcomings and oversights and setbacks, he was loved. For now, he was saving for an attorney for Solemn. When he could afford to … which was not yet. But it would be soon. He came back and spoke his first words with Solemn since Akila yanked her from his house to bring her to report here. He was unrehearsed, low, gaunt.

“I really have missed you, Solemn.”

She did not respond.

“And things are going to be better for us when you get out of here. It won't be long. You're gonna be living in a house, after this. And go to college.”

“I don't want to go to college,” Solemn told him. “I want to go to the city. Nashville. Chicago. Then, maybe I'll go to college there.”

“City's a rough place, Solemn,” Bev said. “And we don't know nobody there. I think you should think about coming back home. Life will be better.”

“I'm gonna go to work,” she told them, pushing her glasses up against her nose with her arms crossed. “And make a lot of money, so we won't ever have to steal and lie again.” Here, she said what she wanted.

“I haven't been a perfect man,” Redvine explained. “We all make mistakes. But I do love you. I'm sorry. I know you've been put through a lot.”

Talk turned to mutual grounds of television, Dandy, the books. Solemn would report what she needed them to know. Bev spied on her limbs, saw no bruises or welts. She had every tooth still in her mouth. No plugs in her hair, unbraided, to Bev's chagrin.

“I really don't know if I'm ever gonna know what all happened in Bledsoe,” she said. “No matter what it was in particular, it was a lot in general.”

“Solemn, what happened in Bledsoe is we love you and we still do,” one of them said, united front going home to be alone and probably enjoy it.

Fine.
It didn't mean she didn't love them. However, in her eyes they diminished and cooled off, adjusted down to the regard of siblings. Their promises lost the potential of Christmas presents and surprise riddles to delight her, even the one that she would see them again—soon and much more often, now.

*   *   *

Solemn stared down into the washbowl, at the cloth in it, mostly playing in the water more than washing up, buying herself time by herself. The residue of gray suds formed chalky pictures in the bowl. The fizz and scum convoluted into people waving their hellos and good-byes, so many people. Solemn stared down. She broke up the shimmery portraits with her washrag, put it over her face and 'round her body. Then a new portrait came back the minute she soaped up the rag again. She had mind to throw the soap against the medicine cabinet. The mirror was removed to prevent fights with broken glass. Or she could wet it just enough to slick over the floor so the girl behind her could slip. But then she might lose points. She added those like coins, too.

She paid no mind to the line probably behind her. The rest of the girls really didn't care about the solo time they could earn in a private bathroom. The privilege was just a power trip and to practice manipulation over the staff, to make sure they still had the same charms they thought they did that got them there to begin with. But Solemn wondered when she was going to have her space. She hadn't grown up with it.

“One day,” said the girl standing behind her, just the height of her neck.

I know I locked this door …

“You gotta be patient,” said another girl, towered over her at least a head.

They were not so much startling as annoying. These faces were a distillation of women on dirt roads and little girls who sucked candy with her on Easters. These voices were a mockery of all her mama and Akila and teachers had spoken to her. Their postures were akin to Majority's when she stammered to be taken seriously or just taken, period. Their attitudes were just as cocky as the Weathers woman who swooped down on her in dreams.

“Work hard,” they said.

“I do. I always have!” she yelled. To all of them, none in particular, but in an outburst that sent the deformities behind her to the exit she herself could not find.

Day Worker 1, 2, or 3 banged on the door. Banged and banged and banged.

“Miss Redvine, ya time up,” a woman said. “What you doin' in there?”

What if she was sick? What if she was messy? What if she was sore? Even in Bledsoe, she had owned the toilet when she was on it. She had slept in a room with nothing but her cat to maybe sit up there, too. Here, she had nothing. What could she do?

Solemn stormed out of the bathroom to sink into the group room. Majority gaggled around in the corner with some of the Mississippi tomboys who talked too slow and roundabout to turn her on, though they tried. The unspoken rule was in real life and outside the secrets they shared at night, she stood off from Majority. Self-imposed solitary confinement teamed up with the good manners she had been taught to earn her a respect among peers and staff who noticed.

“Got somebody come see you,” Dr. Givens appeared behind her to say.

“Who?” The woman just wouldn't let up on her, treated her special, and Solemn wasn't buying it until she knew how much it really cost.

“Well, come with me and see,” Dr. Givens said.

“I'm not gonna come see somebody I don't know who,” Solemn said.

“Miss Redvine, since you insist on being difficult—”

“I'm one of the best ones here,” Solemn argued.

“Since I can't even dispute that, I'll just tell you then. It's Detective Justin Bolden from Kosciusko, where you from.”

“My parents fine?”

“Come on here, gal…”

None of them knew when the State would come in to inspect, and it was best they all stayed on cordial toes for anything looked like it. Bernadine was off to the cafeteria to get him coffee when Solemn came up to the front. Bolden stood immediately. Already, in just the short time since he had seen her last, she almost met him nose to nose. She saw her distorted face in the silver of the badge overtaking his breast.

“Hi Solemn,” he said.

“What I do now?”

Caught off guard, charmed even, Bolden smiled.

“He was up here in the area. He come to check on you,” Dr. Givens told Solemn.

“I know I just popped up. I don't want to intrude,” Bolden told her.

“No intrusion, Detective. My office okay? Any excuse I have to—”

“I noticed a garden on the grounds.”

“Most of the flowers dead now. Won't bloom for another couple of months.”

“Dr. Givens, it'll be just fine. No special accommodations required. I was in the area and decided to stop. I'll only be a minute.”

“That okay with you, Solemn?” Dr. Givens asked.

“Do I gotta choice?” Solemn said.

“Hell no.” Miss Bernadine had coffee for Bolden and a cold cola can for Solemn.

“Well, since he came all the way here, I guess,” Solemn agreed. She had heard a little bit of it, the special favors the brown cop created for her. The rule of favors was one she planned to use to work both ways for herself, whenever she could.

In the garden, Solemn couldn't exactly be excited. She knew the brown cop had not come to take her home. They would have told her by now so she could get her stuff.

“I been looking over your case a lot Solemn,” Bolden said.

“For what?”

“Just because. Well, because it's my job.”

They came to a small path meant to mark the exit through the clearing the property sat upon, the way out and forward, or back. It was pink and gray and teal spread by state prisoners' uncompensated, sunburnt hands. On it, Solemn wondered how to kill someone. But she saw Bolden had no pistol at his hip the way he always had before. She couldn't take it and blow his brains out, as she imagined back in Bledsoe. Home. With her up thumb on one hand and a gun in the other, it would take just one slow driver to stop for her in order to get up to Nashville. Or back to Singer's, to click shut the door of her trailer and never come out again. To sleep all day and maybe die stuck to the couch like redone upholstery. To hump and shiver into a cat like Dandy. Maybe go live down in the well. A wild well woman she could be. Plenty of water, frogs, and spiders to munch.