Whisper (26 page)

“Your mom's been here for a while, a regular attendee. You guys can have a family reunion. You look just like her.” When she laughed loudly, her chin disappeared into her neck. Her hair was the color of the berry from the dogwood tree, and her skin looked flaky and old under a coating of white powder. My mother was not here.

I was being charged with attacking the man in the store who had put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me away from the beautiful coat. My imprisonment would be for a month unless I was able to come up with bail. They told me that someone had to pay two hundred dollars to get me out of jail, the cost of a month's stay at Purgatory Palace, the cost of two months' pay that I owed Celso, the cost of two beautiful green coats that reminded me of forests.

They pressed all my fingers against a black inkpad and then recorded the print my fingertips made on a piece of paper where all my information had been printed in neat, perfect type. They took my picture against a white background, then told me to turn to the side. I had never had my picture taken before—my deformities would now be visible to those who had never even met me.

“I'll take her to her cell,” said the younger police officer. I was glad that it would be him—his rounded cheeks were gentle, not angled like the older one's.

He pointed to a door at the back of the room, and I moved toward it. An old woman with no teeth was being asked questions at another desk. When I walked by, she reached out and scratched the back of my hand. I looked at the line of red that appeared on the top of my hand, but I avoided meeting the eyes of this woman I'd done nothing to. The police officer reached around me and opened the door, and I looked down a long flight of stairs. The stairs were made of stone, like the outside of the jail, and twisted and turned downward. The smell of dirt and urine wafted up.

I put my right hand against the wall to steady myself. I wasn't shaking, but I felt tired—very, very tired.

“I'm Officer Nicholas,” he said. His footsteps fell heavily on the stairs behind me, spurring me on into the darkness below. Small lights jutted out of the wall—lights that gave off a white glow with no warmth. I'd always thought of the earth as a warm refuge from the chill of the night, but the air in this place grew crisp as we descended.

When we got to the bottom, I stood in front of a row of locked cages with metal bars that reached from the ceiling to the floor. No windows broke the darkness with rays of warm yellow light. I heard a moaning that made the hair on my arms stand up.

The first two cages housed silent, staring men who watched our progress, their clothing so worn and old it fell in strips over their bodies. The moaning was coming from the next cell, from a heap of clothing in the far corner.

“Lizzy, shut up already. You want to scare your new roommate?”

The pile of rags rocked back and forth, but the noise didn't stop. Gray hair, curled and matted like discolored yarn, was all that was visible of the woman inside the heap. Officer Nicholas opened the cell door and waited for me to enter. I took a couple of tentative steps into the cage.

“Oh,” he said. “I need that instrument and that sack of stuff.”

My hands tightened around the mouth of my small sack. And then my breathing sped up, my heart began to thump, my shoulders hunched. Through all the questions, the giving of my fingerprints, the taking of pictures, I had not felt the tears burn, but now, when he was about to take the last few items that defined who I was and where I'd been, I choked and coughed on my swelling throat and flooding tears.

“I need this,” I whispered.

“Sorry. Can't have it. No belongings in the jail cells.”

“But there's nothing in here, nothing I could hurt someone with or hurt myself with. The violin was a gift.” I could hear the pitch of my voice begin to rise. I felt ashamed—frantic and embarrassed.

Without asking again, Officer Nicholas took the sack away from me and pulled on the violin strap. When he dragged the strap off my shoulder, the violin began to slide down my back. I clung to the strap with my right hand, envisioning the instrument hitting the floor and snapping in half, my life torn in two.

“Got it,” he said. His hands were on the violin case, and he lowered it to the floor. I stepped out of the strap and into the cell. When I turned around, Officer Nicholas locked the cell door and walked away with my only possessions. My violin and small sack of belongings would sit on a desk at the bottom of a stone hole. Now all that remained of me was a deformed face, a carved violin around my neck and a stained slip that warmed my legs. The stones seeped cold through my sweater and rough cotton pants, and the floor offered nothing but hardness. There were two benches in the room and a bucket.

A month.

I sat down on the bench nearest to me. It was pushed up against the metal bars of the next cell, a cell with a woman in it. This woman had red circles painted on her cheeks and blue arches over her eyes. I turned my back to her, pulled my knees up to my chest and curled around myself, wishing I had a blanket to wrap around me. This was it—all I was, all I had left. I was a husk now, an empty nest, and even though I was broken and deformed, no one would rescue me or fit their body against mine. I knew this.

I woke when I felt hands in my hair. Lizzy stood in front of me, layers of tattered clothing hanging from her like vulture feathers.

“Black rain,” she said.

I looked into her face, into her toothless mouth. I slid along the bench, and when I got to the end, I stepped off and stumbled to the door of the cage. She watched me. She didn't try to grab me. She didn't run after me with clawing fingers, scratching and tearing. Her crooning had stopped, but the white lights from the stairway threw shadows under her eyes and made her sunken cheeks almost skeletal.

“Don't like what you see?” She put her hands on her hips and offered me a smile of missing teeth and blackened gums. The bars pressed against my back, locking me in as I tried to wedge myself into the corner away from her.

“What you so scared of, lovey? Old Lizzy won't hurt you.”

She took plodding, careful steps toward me. I balled my hands into fists. When she was a step away, she smiled and cackled a low, creaking laugh.

“Lizzy knows you, and you know Lizzy.”

I shook my head. My breath came fast and shallow. I needed Rosa, someone hard and worn—someone who knew how to protect herself, to lash out and slash. Candela wouldn't have put up with anything from this woman, and here I was, cowering in the corner.

“Lizzy and you are the same.”

I shouted so loudly, the echo from my voice, from that one word, bounced back at me, nasal and harsh. The word itself seemed to mock me. “NO.”

She cackled loudly, her mouth wide open, an irregular circle. I covered my ears with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. I screamed over top of her laugh. I screamed until my voice became hoarse. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and slid down the bars to sit on the floor, crouching there until my arms ached from being held to my ears and until my back developed indentations from the bars behind me. When I couldn't stand to keep my arms wrapped around my head, I dared to open my eyes.

Lizzy was asleep on the bench where I had originally sat, her snores rhythmic and calm. She was not me. That woman was not me. I would never croon in the corner of a jail cell, reek of urine, lose my sanity—she was not me, even though her face looked exactly like mine.

Eighteen

I didn't sleep that night. An earache had come in full force, the throbs and sharp pinches keeping me awake. If I didn't put oil in my ear soon, the eardrum could swell and rupture. I watched Lizzy until I heard footsteps on the stairs above us and the men began to mutter and stir.

“Porridge, my favorite,” one of the men said.

“Good thing we're not having bacon and eggs again. I'm so sick of bacon and eggs,” said another amid low mirthless chuckles.

“Yeah, yeah,” the officer said. “Come up with something new, would ya?”

I needed to go to the bathroom so badly, I was scared to stand up. I wobbled as I rose to my feet, my knees buckling and my back aching. I shakily stood erect and watched Lizzy, wondering when she would rise and remind me again of what could become of me. Even though her eyes were closed, she muttered and twisted her hands in her hair.

An officer I hadn't seen before opened the door to our cell and pushed a tray with two bowls and two spoons inside.

When he left to go back up the stairs, I looked at the bucket. I knew what it was for. I recognized the smell of a homemade latrine, and I was desperate enough to use it, but everyone would see me. Unlike in the bathroom at Purgatory Palace, where the stalls were open and exposed, I felt no camaraderie in this experience.

I crept over to the bucket, imagining Lizzy's clawlike hands stretching out to me, grabbing me as I slid past. I reached the bucket and scooted it against the stone wall. Lowering my pants, lowering my mother's slip, but keeping my sweater pulled down, I looked from Lizzy to the cells where the men were, but they were too busy eating their porridge to notice me.

There was nothing to wipe with. I could feel heat in my cheeks. I sat over the bucket for a few minutes, air drying, and while I did so, Lizzy rose from her bed and took a bowl of porridge. I pulled up my pants and hugged my body with my arms. She did not look up from her intense eating. Her hair fell into and around the bowl while she gobbled—she did not appear to care that some of the food leaked through the slits in her face.

My hands were filthy from the edges of the bucket, but there was nowhere to wash. Every inch of this place felt unclean, from the hard-packed dirt floors to the benches covered with a sticky residue to the bars that looked slick with sweat. I stood in the middle of the cell, wondering how to avoid touching anything. A month I would be here, thirty days, and I could not stand in the middle of the cell for that length of time without touching something.

I took a bowl of porridge and sat on the bench. The porridge smelled of burned pots and sour milk—I could not bring myself to eat it so placed it beside me.

Lizzy shuffled across the room, her back bent, and sat on the bench next to me, picking up my bowl of porridge and quickly shoveling its contents into her mouth. I held my breath and then turned my head away, trying to avoid the smell of body odor, urine and unwashed clothes that contaminated the air around her. My arms were wrapped around my knees, holding them tightly against my chest, but Lizzy's insistent fingers pulled at me, gripping and tugging until I relaxed and allowed her to hold my hand. What did she want from me? I still held my head away, trying to breathe in untainted air.

She began to rock, moving the bench back and forth, and after first trying to resist and hold stiff, I relaxed and moved with her. While she rocked, Lizzy hummed a low song deep in her throat, and my eyes slowly closed. I remembered the tune from when I was a child and my mother used to visit me.

Flitting bright macaw dancing in the trees
bring in the sun to shrink away the night
Tookatiel
Tookatiel
The moon is now gone
My soft morning sun.

One of her hands held mine, and her other brushed over the top of my fingers, gently, lightly, like the touch of dry grasses. My head, so tired from not sleeping, felt clouded and full, and while I rocked I could believe that this was my mother singing to me, holding my hand, keeping me safe. Lizzy turned my hand over so my palm was up, and across it she rolled an object back and forth. The object felt cool and smooth, as though it had been rolled across a hand many times. I opened my eyes and stopped rocking.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

Lizzy hummed her tune again, but the vision of the creek by our house, the grasses in the meadow and the rustle of wind through the trees disappeared and became a mudpacked earth floor, the rancid odor of unburied shit and the sound of discontented men bickering with each other. I held her hands still in mine and shook her arms. “Tell me.”

She looked at me then, her clouded eyes focusing on something beyond me, over my shoulder. I shook her arm again and held the object in my hand so tightly that I could feel its grooves beginning to dig into my skin.

“He doesn't know,” she said and then giggled as if she were five years old. “I know where they come from, but he doesn't know that I watch him sometimes.”

“Who?” I wanted to shout at her and shake her, but instead I gripped the object tighter.

“I took this one without him knowing and I hold it, remembering.”

She reached for the wooden piece in my hand, but I stood up from the bench, stepped back and held it behind me. With my other hand, I pulled the carved violin from around my neck and showed it to Lizzy, waving it in front of her.

“Give it,” she said, not seeing the violin.

I stepped back when she reached for me. I held the violin up to her face. She waved it away with her hand and gripped my arm so tightly her fingernails punctured my skin.