Chapter Twenty-Five

The only thing that mattered were the books. They got to visit the library once a week, and the cart came around most days. That was like heaven, which was scary at first. The old Whitney never even read, at least not unless she had to. But the new one really didn’t have any other choice.

She read all kinds of things until the words built up walls in her head. She felt protected inside there, reading any and everything, except poetry. But eventually she read poetry too. She found Plath, and every word felt like it was coming from the body that shared her cell with her. But the body belonged to Halo, a former prostitute who was as illiterate as she was arrestingly pretty. Halo had stabbed her pimp and spent her days as if the bars would magically open soon, and out she’d be, back on the streets doing what she had always done.

For someone so heavily steeped in make believe, Whitney was able to swallow a stronger dose of reality. She knew the bars wouldn’t magically open. That was something that had been deeply ingrained the day she was convicted and given a thirty-to-life sentence. 

No one ever asked why she had done it. But she knew Franklin knew. Franklin had been called to the stand, and he stayed loyal to his God, telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But the prosecutor didn’t grill him like she had Whitney’s mother, Marge, who looked like one of those unhinged women gathering up tops at a half-price sale. Franklin was naturally calm and collected. He had told them everything exactly as it had happened, even down to the conversation he had with Whitney the afternoon before she left. 

He just didn’t mention the part about Jamal being gay. A withholding of information but not a lie.

Nobody knew that part. Whitney had tried for years to not know that part either. But that was the spider that stung her skin. Regardless, her son could never learn what had led to this whole mess in the first place.

She had nothing but time, so she spent part of it wondering what would have happened if she had never driven to the university to confront Jamal. Maybe there could have been some sort of therapy or church camp that could have washed his brain, or maybe she could have withheld her own information and never spoken a word about what Franklin had said. But against her own intuition, she had more Marge in her than she had originally thought.

Her body couldn’t keep in the truth.

The papers said she had snapped. The people who heckled her and spit at her as she walked up the steps of the courthouse called her nasty names. For several years, she believed that she truly was who they said she was. It was a convincing argument after all. Who else was wired to kill a man in cold blood, let alone the father of their child?

It made her mean. When she first got to prison, she made sure people could smell it on her, the acrid scent of her soul. She got solitary when she busted a girl’s head against the faucet in the bathroom for looking at her wrong. Granted, the girl was roughly her age and just as skinny, but she had felt a power that made her feel six feet tall. She worked it in the cafeteria, squaring her shoulders and walking slow and steady against the Pine-Sol-streaked tile. Her reputation apparently preceded her because nobody came to mess with the newbie. In a way, Whitney was slightly disappointed because now she’d have to contend with herself.

So, she spent years doing that. It started one day when she saw the library cart. It squeaked past cell after cell until it reached hers. Halo was snoring, a loud repugnant snore that was at odds with her pretty face. Whitney got up and reached her hand into the pile, eyes closed, like she was making a wish, and out came The Catcher in the Rye.

This was one of those books she should have read in high school, but because she never finished and wasn’t required to read it for her GED, it had never become a part of her life. Now, it seemed to be her whole world.

She was Holden, locked in her own version of a sanitorium, continuously swimming through her conscious thoughts and quilting them together like patches. How horribly unreliable Holden was. And that was probably the only reason Whitney trusted him.

Whitney didn’t trust Gina who popped her cell door twice with her baton. “Up and at ‘em,” the woman said, her stringy voice inching through the cracks in the hinge. Whitney studied Gina’s face. Long and angular. Her hair was brought back into a regulation bun to keep the inmates from tearing off her ponytail. She looked kind of like a man in the dark shadow of the small room.

“I don’t want company,” Halo mumbled, mouth against pillow.

“Not for you princess. For Squirrelly, here.” Whitney had trained her face not to move when Gina or any other of the prison guards called her that name. It started out as “Squirrel” when Gina was the one assigned to Whitney’s orientation during intake. “You look so small and scared,” Gina smirked, and it felt like a horse’s head was sneering at her. The anger that pulled the trigger was lurking behind her sternum, and she was afraid it would soon travel to both of her hands. But she managed to leave Gina unscathed, and in return, herself out of trouble. “Squirrel” became “Squirrelly” after her incident in the bathroom, and now even her fellow inmates called her that. But better to be crazy than a target.

“Who is it?” Whitney asked. She hadn’t planned on anyone visiting her today, seeing visits were rare in general, but she figured it was her mother. Marge’s letter bore heat through her pillow. Whitney had stuffed it under there after enduring everything Marge had written. She had no clue how it could have happened. Her Travis. Her baby. Her brain was on a fixed circuit, only producing images of her son as he was the last time she saw him. But he was nearly fifteen now and locked up in juvie. It was insanity to think about. Was there something latent in both of them that suddenly sprung to life and made them monsters? And as much as Whitney’s heart tore open knowing her son was in a similar boat, she shamefully allowed herself another feeling: a sense of not being alone. 

She looked up at Gina’s grim face as the woman picked something from her teeth.

“Some chick named Denise McGovern.”