“What’s a loophole? Is that like a hula hoop?”
“Gracie?”
“Okay. Are you gonna tell my daddy?”
“I have to.”
For the first time, Grace felt truly bad about what she’d done. Now her daddy would give her that disappointed look, and she’d get scared and snuggle up to him and hope he wouldn’t leave her. She didn’t have a mommy. What would she do without a daddy?
Nineteen
“Scared? What do you mean, you’re scared?”
Lexi leaned against the gray wall of her cell. After seventy-one and a half months in prison, she was finally getting out. She’d served her whole sentence—and then some, thanks to bad choices—so there would be no parole for her, no probation. She had a community service advocate who was prepared to help her “transition,” but the truth was that in a few minutes, she’d be just another citizen, free to go where she pleased. All she knew was that she was going to Florida to be with Eva; after that, her life stretched out like a desert highway with no end or turns in sight.
Strangely, now that the day was upon her, she was afraid to leave. This ten-foot square cell had become her world, and there was a safety in the familiarity of it. There were eight steps from the bed to the toilet; two from the sink to the wall; three from the bed to the door. The walls were covered with Tamica’s family photos—pictures of people that had become like family to Lexi. Her own pictures, of Aunt Eva and Zach and Mia, had been taken down years ago. Looking back was too painful, and a waste of time on top of it. She could never forget Mia’s smile, with or without a reminder.
“Lexi?” Tamica put down the tabloid magazine she was reading. “What do you mean, you’re scared?”
“I know who I am in here.”
“You don’t want to focus on whoever you became in here, hermana. Especially not you. You got so much life ahead of you.”
Lexi looked down at her few belongings. On the end of the bed were her prized possessions, all that she’d hoarded and collected in the past years: a shoe box full of letters—from Aunt Eva and to Grace; Mia and Zach’s senior pictures and a photograph of the three of them at a school dance; and a worn, often-read paperback copy of Wuthering Heights. No more Jane Eyre for her; why read about someone else’s happy ending?
A guard appeared at the door. “Time to go, Baill.”
Tamica moved slowly off the bed. In the past few years, as Lexi had whittled her own body down to a runner’s leanness, Tamica had packed on the pounds. She claimed menopause was the culprit, but prison food didn’t help.
Lexi stared at the sad, dark face of the woman who had saved her in here, had been a friend when she desperately needed one; if Lexi still knew how to cry, she would have. “I’ll miss you,” Lexi said, wrapping her arms around Tamica’s broad, rounded back.
“I’ll write to you,” Lexi promised.
“Send me a picture of you and Grace.”
“Tamica … I gave up that right,” she said. “You know that.”
Tamica grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her. “You know what I would give to be walking outta here with you? Don’t you dare be JELL-O. You made a mistake and you paid for it. Period.” She pulled Lexi into another hard embrace. “See your daughter, at least.”
“Come on, Baill,” the guard said.
Lexi let go of Tamica and walked over to the bed, where she gathered up her few belongings. She intended just to walk out, be as cool as possible, but she couldn’t. At the door, she paused and turned back.
Tamica was crying. “Don’t you come back,” she said, “or I’ll whoop your white ass.”
“I won’t,” Lexi promised.
As she carried her pathetic shoe box through the prison, women catcalled and yelled to her. She remembered how they had scared her at first, these women. She was one of them now, and she knew that no matter how long she lived or how much she changed, a part of her would be here, behind bars. Maybe a part of her always had been. A girl without a mother was a prisoner of a different kind.
At the desk, another uniformed guard handed her some paperwork and a bag with her own clothes in it, as well as a small manila envelope.
“You can change in there,” the guard said, pointing to a door down the hall.
Lexi went inside the room and shut the door. Alone, she stripped out of her faded, worn prison khakis and secondhand underwear.
Inside the bag, she found the wrinkled black pants and white blouse she’d worn to the courthouse so long ago, along with her own beige bra and black panties and a flattened patchwork denim purse. Black kneesocks and cheap black flats completed the old Lexi look. Or the young Lexi.