Chapter Thirty

The prison wasn’t far, just on the edge of Little Rock, but Denise felt a world away. She was briskly frisked and sitting in a waiting area with people who scared her. And Denise was hardly ever scared. But there was something deep inside the scars on their arms and the face tattoo the man across from her wore, his mouth a knife-sharp slit. It was the result of living the kind of life Denise had never known and never would. Where her heart wore raw when she thought of her father’s neglect and her mother’s despair, these people’s hearts were scabbed over, crusted. They looked like they had taken to eating them for breakfast.

Denise had been here before, countless cases she waded through ankle-deep in her closet-sized office. But this trip rattled the nerves in her stomach. She felt an unfamiliar wave of panic about meeting the woman who killed her best friend. But it was more than that. How could someone so small and almost forgettable commit the kind of act that would make them never be forgotten? And then Denise shamefully thought of the answer—it was because sometimes, being forgotten was a pill that just couldn’t be swallowed.

“McGovern.” A woman as thick as a brick with a donut-shaped bun rocked Denise out of her reverie. She followed this woman and her baton to a small room much like the ones where she’d meet clients in the past. In fact, she recognized this one and tried to find comfort in the orange circular seats bolted to the table in the middle of the room and the cracked pane of window glass that sat behind thick crisscrossed bars, but she couldn’t. She supposed she should be thankful to have a one-on-one sit down instead of being shepherded to the communal meeting area where all the people who scared her were talking, or laughing, or screaming at the ones they’d come to visit. Denise wondered which one of those she felt like doing herself. She wore her best outfit—a fitted skirt and jacket, both the color of dusk and black heels, not too low, not too high. She looked professional but pretty, at least the version she could throw together nowadays. Somewhere inside her, she felt ashamed for getting all dolled up knowing all along she’d be meeting a woman who hadn’t seen a tube of lipstick in the last ten or so years. It was stupid, immature. Look at the fancy big shot I am now, her clothes seemed to scream, and Denise knew it wasn’t the person she was now who had gotten dressed this morning. It was the person she used to be.

What do you hope to accomplish? she thought, trying not to decipher what the white streaks coating the top of the metal table were. She knew, deep down, she wanted to ask for forgiveness. She knew, deep down, that who she used to be wasn’t the type of person who went out of her way to encourage or comfort a person on the fringe. She took a broken swallow knowing the fringe was where she had always resided too. And so, she knew the answer to that question that rolled around the smooth contours of her skull. She wanted to be forgiven.