A better officer would have asked how many kilos, what drugs did you pack, and who asked you to do this. Right? They would have investigated further.
Did I know what it was that I packed? No. I knew my sister had a track record in our family of getting into trouble. She’d supposedly cleaned up. I’d backed her over and over again, even when my mom called and said she didn’t think it was a good idea for Izzy to visit me in Puerto Rico.
“Too many temptations and freedom when she’s not home, Delilah.” My mother’s accent still carried through the phone after all these years. She’d slip back into Greek sometimes, and my father would chuckle because we all only understood about a third of what she was saying. We just knew we were in trouble when her native language flew out. “Haven’t I taught you anything? You graduate from that university and you immediately keep disobeying me. You should be in medical school, not traveling around nursing. You could be a doctor.”
Reassuring my mother that I knew how to deal with my twin sister would have fallen on deaf ears. I finally cut her off and told her this was my life. Plus I missed Izzy, and she was coming.
And now me taking the blame may have been my way of avoiding the truth, that mom was right and that my twin sister really did just screw us over.
She’d come for a weekend to visit me at my new nursing job. I’d only been there for two months, but I was trying my best to acclimate to a bilingual workplace and had just written up my ultimate bucket list. All on my own.
I was all on my own and embracing my very own life. Yet, she begged me to fly back to Springfield, our little town, with her for a couple days to visit family.
My baby twin sister had a knack for finding my weakness. “The family misses you, Lilah. You went from UCLA straight off to nursing and you never visit. Mom cried the other night, I swear.”
Was any of that even true?
“You want to admit to anything else?” He smiled wide, and I knew he’d probably pat himself on the back as he walked out of the interrogation room.
“I think I’ll want to talk with a lawyer before I say anything else.”
He sneered at me. “You’re going to be in jail a long time, young lady.”
I cleared my throat, trying not to panic. “I get to make a phone call, right?”
Like I had anyone to call other than my mom and dad. If I called them, they’d probably panic too. I needed a plan of action. My mom watched court TV and my dad worked most days marketing beer, but that was about all the knowledge I was going to get from them.
The TSA officer leaned forward and put his hands on the table so he could look down at me sitting there, like I was the scum on the bottom of his shoe. “You’re under arrest for the possession of cocaine and smuggling. It’s a felony. You don’t get your phone call yet. Now, hands behind your back.”
Two other officers came in, like I was going to fight them.
Me. Delilah Hardy. Valedictorian of my high school class. I’d graduated summa cum laude from UCLA, for crying out loud. I’d never even so much as served a single detention in my entire academic career.
He read me my rights as I tried to suck in air and breathe it out slowly, methodically, and in the same rhythm.
The only person I knew to be calm in a terrible situation like this was a man I tried not to think about anymore. He was the reason I avoided going home. And yet every second I needed to take a relaxing breath, I thought of him. Dante.
He’d been sixteen when I was eleven and had locked myself in the dark basement of the neighbor’s house.
“Let’s count to seven, one breath out and one breath in, huh?” he’d said as he jiggled the lock. My brothers had left me, and Dante had found me ten minutes later, probably by hearing me hyperventilating.
We counted together. I heard the soft numbers rolling from his mouth, and by seven the door had opened for me to jump into his arms.
Seven was my number with him from then on. When they sent Izzy to juvenile hall for being high and stealing from a store while I was still in it, Dante and my brother Dom had been there to pick me up while my parents went to the station. We counted to seven. That time, I made him do it with me seven times.
I was probably going to have to count to seven, seven hundred times to feel better about this one.
Jesus. I was going to jail.
I wasn’t ready for that. I’d taken this job after college had delivered next to nothing of an experience. I found myself unfulfilled and completely scared that I would care about nothing my whole life, that I’d do nothing in it that would warrant someone looking twice at me.