Where is the Baby? (12 page)

‘No idea. Just going east.'

‘Wish
I
was. Good luck to you, hon, and thanks again.'

‘You're most welcome.'

In jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, a Shetland crew-neck sweater tied around her neck by its sleeves, with short socks and soft leather loafers, Tally felt more comfortable behind the wheel. Her purchases were in the trunk, along with a new Hartmann suitcase and a small backpack. When she stopped for the night she'd organize the bags, and have her choice of a dozen books to read.

She popped one of the new cassettes into the player and felt a surge of genuine pleasure as the first notes of the Haydn
Cello Concerto in C
emerged from the speakers. The music lifted her mood, just as the clothes had done. Her foot no longer shook on the accelerator. In less than twenty-four hours, driving had become automatic, natural. With luck, she'd make it into mid-Wyoming by nightfall. Hundreds of miles now lay behind her. She wanted it to be thousands. Distance couldn't alter the past, but at the very least she could be physically removed from it. And perhaps at a great distance, she might be able to consider everything that had happened fifteen years before – something she did only involuntarily, in dreams. During all the waking hours of her five thousand three hundred and seventy-two days of being encaged, she'd focused only on the moment. Get through one hour, then the next. Somehow, the hours accumulated into days, weeks, months, years. And she'd withstood the tedium, kept her mind engaged by reading anything available, by doing crossword puzzles, and by conversations with Warden Hughes, a woman with a surprisingly diverse range of interests.

For a moment, without knowing she was going to do it, she tried to remember Anna's face, but all that appeared on her mental screen was an amorphous outline. She had only a handful of photographs of her. She had some of Clayton too, but she hadn't looked at any of them since the day of her allocution and sentencing. His face, too, refused to come into focus. Someday she might look at the pictures – but not in the foreseeable future. Just this brief, unanticipated bit of recall created a pain similar to that first slash from Angie's teaspoon-knife: a searing electric message. She pushed it away, returning her attention to the music, Jacqueline du Pré dragging passion from her cello.

The place names struck her as odd, even funny. ‘Deeth' she read as Death. The exit for Danger Cave was intriguing, and she was tempted to stop, but didn't. She crossed into Utah, taken with Wendover, an ambling, pleasant name.
Let me know when it's over
, she thought, glancing at the gas gauge.

She stopped outside Salt Lake City to fill the gas tank and use the restroom, deciding she'd eat once she was on the far side of the city, approaching the Wyoming border. She was now in a part of the country she'd only ever read about in history and geography textbooks. Studying the map she'd bought before leaving Elko, she thought she'd try to make it to either Green River or Rock Springs. And tomorrow she'd aim for Nebraska. There was no rush. She had no destination, except away. All she knew with certainty was that she would never go back to Nevada, or to her birthplace, San Francisco. The place once called home had been no more than an illusion, no more real than a child's fervid imagining.

Who was it who said that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in? Frost, that was it. Robert Frost. Must have had an actual family, she thought. The same fellow who wrote about the lovely dark woods and promises to keep.

‘Ah, Mr Frost,' she said aloud, ‘I have no promises to keep. But I do have some miles to go.'

Mental note: buy a collection of Frost's poems.

The Wyoming license plates stated: Like No Place on Earth. It was true. Vast beneath a wide-open sky, the land stretched into the distance on all sides with scarcely a sign of habitation. She felt dwarfed by the great expanses, and genuinely free. Beyond the leathery-smelling confines of the car, there was nothing on the landscape to restrain her. She went rocketing along the highway, jittery with the knowledge that no one was monitoring her actions, that there was no one to whom she was obliged to answer for her decisions. Free in The Equality State, headed east toward Ever Upward, and Live Free or Die.

That evening, unwilling to face another diner where people would look her over and the waitress might not be as good-humored and accommodating as the woman in Elko, she opted for the drive-thru at McDonald's. It was her first experience of drive-thru service. Although she wasn't given sufficient time to decipher the menu, she very much liked the concept of being able to purchase a meal without having to leave the car. A bit rattled by the impatience of the young woman at the window, Tally said, ‘Why don't you order for me?'

‘O-kaaaaay!' the teenager said, mildly exasperated, eyes narrowed for a moment before she turned away. Seconds later, she held out a bag, stated a price, and Tally paid. She then returned to her motel with what she determined from the wrapper was a Big Mac, an enormous order of fries, and a large Coke. Actually, she decided, removing the plastic lid to look inside, it was a large cup of ice with Coke flavoring.

She watched television, switching channels every few minutes, as she worked on the food, preferring the fries to the immense burger, which she abandoned after only a few bites.

The offerings on TV fascinated her. Some of the prime-time shows had been popular inside –
That's Incredible
was a great favorite of the inmates. Tally had found it incredible that anyone would watch such crap. Years ago, she'd loved
The Avengers
, and Carol Burnett's show: Jonathan Winters made her howl with his edgy, half-mad humor. Best of all was Dick Cavett's morning interviews. There were things worth watching then. Now, as she ran through the channels, the offerings seemed shoddy. Mental popcorn: pleasant to eat, never filling.

Finished with the food, she sorted through her purchases, setting out fresh underwear and clean socks for the morning, and her new pajamas and slippers. Everything else went into the suitcase, except the Kurt Vonnegut novel she'd decided to read first, and her toiletries. Car doors slamming outside her door made her jump. Then came the voices of a couple, talking as they opened the door of the room next to hers.

God!
She remained in place, eyes on the curtained windows, until her frenzied heart-rate began to ease. Then there was the sound of another car pulling to a stop, another car door slamming, and her common sense –
it's a motel, people are stopping for the night, pull yourself together
– did battle with old fear.
The pounding on the door will start any moment now. No, it's just people ready for a rest after a long day of driving But what if it's . . . NoNoNo it's over, over!

Long minutes passed before she was able to move. But as she washed her face and cleaned her teeth before brushing her hair, she kept looking over at the windows, then at the door. She could tell herself over and over that history didn't repeat itself, but she couldn't quite buy into that – not with a history like hers.

Even settled in bed with the Vonnegut novel propped on her upraised knees, her eyes went repeatedly to the windows, then the door. And each time a car door slammed, her heart did, too.

F
or a second night she kept waking every half hour or so. She thought it might be because she no longer had the security of a set of locked bars across the entrance to the cell she shared with sixty-something Bertie, who was as silent as Tally. Bertie was lean in a constricted fashion, as if (like Tally) her primary goal was to keep everything within her closely contained. Clean and tidy, her hair surprisingly thick and lustrous, her features a time-dulled portrait of the pretty girl she'd once been, she spent her days working in the prison laundry and her nights reading. A small transistor radio, the volume low, was always tuned to an easy-listening station. She and Tally shared books without comment beyond a ‘thank you' and ‘you're welcome.' Despite the proximity that stirred so many of the other cell mates to acts ranging from petty spitefulness or sexual partnership to all-out violence, Tally and Bertie were virtual paragons of politeness. In a place that didn't allow for privacy, they managed to give it to each other. Despite their mutual silence, they respected and even liked each other. Tally always thought that had she been given a life sentence she would, eventually, have become very like Bertie. It was sheer good fortune to have been paired with one of the few other women in the institution with no inclination to bemoan her fate or to volunteer tidbits of her past.

Gazing at the spill of light from the partway closed bathroom door, Tally decided that the notion that she missed the cell bars was crazy. Still, she had to admit that anything that kept caged angry women away from her while she slept had to be construed as a good thing. Now, that particular safety was gone and she wondered how long, if ever, it would take to become accustomed to her newly recovered freedom. It seemed to be fraught with hazards she couldn't have imagined. Certainly, she could never again take for granted the things that had once been an elementary part of her life: the right to go where she wanted, when she wanted, and to do as she wished when she got there. It wasn't surprising that so many of the women wound up back inside again. The system robbed you of the skills needed to live an ordinary life. And the halfway houses she'd overheard the recidivist women speak of sounded worse than the prison, with thefts and fights and endless bitter criticism of everyone and everything.

Tally's refusal to go before a parole board and declare herself sorry for the crime of second-degree murder had kept her contained, like an artifact in the cornerstone of a new building, for the full term of her fifteen-year sentence. She was sorry for many things. But that? No. She preferred to endure the entire fifteen years of lockup rather than make a false declaration. She'd made up her mind at the outset that if she managed to live through the whole sentence, she wanted to leave completely free, answerable to no one. The fact that she didn't care whether or not she lived had made her prison existence tolerable. Interestingly, although they'd never come even close to discussing it, she knew that Bertie shared her attitude, even though Bertie was going to live out her life inside the barbedwire-topped walls.

So here was Tally, supposedly free, startled by slamming car doors and unable to sleep and unable, too, to cry. She remembered clearly the last time she'd shed tears. It wasn't likely she'd ever forget. But if there was one lesson she'd learned in prison it was that tears were viewed as a sign of weakness. Weep, and the predators would be all over you.

There were broomstick rapes in the shower room, beatings and knifings and killings, too. Depending on your crime – and somehow the details were common knowledge the moment you set foot inside – you were marked. It was a strange and primal code, established so long ago that no one knew who'd first decided that certain crimes deserved additional punishment. After the justice system's penalty, came the penalty of your so-called peers. In many ways it was far worse than the loss of autonomy because it meant that there was almost nowhere inside the institution you'd be safe – unless you became someone's sweetheart or their slave.

She yawned, longing for sleep, and pushed away the ugly memories. She pictured Annalise, strong hands holding the reins, her face lit with pleasure as her stallion carried her away at a gallop. Breathing deeply, contentedly, that long ago Tally watched her grandmother ride out of sight. Then she looked up at the vast, empty sky, feeling the heat of the desert sun. The aroma of roasting meat drifted through the screen door from the kitchen, where Alba was making dinner, humming softly as she worked. Over by the barn, Joe was hosing dirty soap off the pickup, which he washed faithfully every week. ‘Preserves the paint,' he'd long-since explained to her. ‘Take care of your vee-hickle and it won't never let you down when you most need it.' Moondust, the retriever bitch, kept jumping at the spray, trying to get a mouthful of the sun-spangled water. And a small lizard dashed down the side of the barn and disappeared into the scrub.

So enamored was she of the drive-thru that she picked up her breakfast at the McDonald's window. The food wasn't particularly good, the coffee was tasteless and far too hot, but she was content to park in a corner of the lot and listen to the radio while she ate her Egg McMuffin and scalded her mouth, trying to wash the greasy food down with the coffee.

When she'd finished, she dumped the trash then studied the map, deciding she'd try to make the Nebraska border by nightfall. She was, she knew, creating meaningless destinations. It didn't matter if she went a hundred miles or four hundred. But she'd always been someone who had to set goals, no matter how minimal. So today she would aim for Nebraska.

After tucking the map into the door pocket, she reached for another of the new cassettes and began removing the cellophane.
Ray Charles and Betty Carter
, one of her all-time favorite albums; music her mother had dismissed as mere noise.

‘You have low tastes, Natalie,' her mother had declared from the doorway of Tally's bedroom. Permed and girdled, tight and judgmental and unsmiling, she stood fingering her pearls as if drawing solace from their shape and feel. Heaven knew she got no satisfaction, never mind comfort, from her intractable daughter. She stated often and unhappily that if she'd known how unrewarding it was to have such a disobedient daughter, she'd never have had a child – a statement that, in its repetition, served to solidify Tally's dislike of her mother.

‘Actually,' thirteen-year-old Tally had replied pleasantly, looking over her shoulder, ‘I have very good taste. Granna's crazy about Ray Charles. This record's going to become a classic. Annalise would love this as much as I do, that is why I plan to buy a copy for her.'