T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“What’s this all about?” he kept saying, the cruiser nosing through the dark streets to the station house, the man at the wheel and the man beside him as incapable of speech as the seats or the wire mesh or the gleaming black dashboard that dragged them forward into the night. And then it was up the steps and into an explosion of light, more men in uniform, stand here, give me your hand, now the other one, and then the cage and the questions. Only then did he think of that thing in the garbage sack and the sound it had made — its body had made — when he flung it into the Dumpster like a sack of flour and the lid slammed down on it. He stared at the walls, and this was a movie too. He’d never been in trouble before, never been inside a police station, but he knew his role well enough, because he’d seen it played out a thousand times on the tube: deny everything. Even as the two detectives settled in across from him at the bare wooden table in the little box of the overlit room he was telling himself just that: Deny it, deny it all.

The first detective leaned forward and set his hands on the table as if he’d come for a manicure. He was in his thirties, or maybe his forties, a tired-looking man with the scars of the turmoil he’d witnessed gouged into the flesh under his eyes. He didn’t offer a cigarette (“I don’t smoke,” Jeremy was prepared to say, giving them that much at least), and he didn’t smile or soften his eyes. And when he spoke his voice carried no freight at all, not outrage or threat or cajolery — it was just a voice, flat and tired. “Do you know a China Berkowitz?” he said.

And she. She was in the community hospital, where the ambulance had deposited her after her roommate had called 911 in a voice that was like a bone stuck in the back of her throat, and it was raining again. Her parents were there, her mother red-eyed and sniffling, her father looking like an actor who’s forgotten his lines, and there was another woman there too, a policewoman. The policewoman sat in an orange plastic chair in the corner, dipping her head to the knitting in her lap. At first, China’s mother had tried to be pleasant to the woman, but pleasant wasn’t what the circumstances called for, and now she ignored her, because the very unpleasant fact was that China was being taken into custody as soon as she was released from the hospital.

For a long while no one said anything — everything had already been said, over and over, one long flood of hurt and recrimination — and the antiseptic silence of the hospital held them in its grip while the rain beat at the windows and the machines at the foot of the bed counted off numbers. From down the hall came a snatch of TV dialogue, and for a minute China opened her eyes and thought she was back in the dorm. “Honey,” her mother said, raising a purgatorial face to her, “are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

“I need to — I think I need to pee.”

“Why?” her father demanded, and it was the perfect non sequitur. He was up out of the chair, standing over her, his eyes like cracked porcelain. “Why didn’t you tell us, or at least tell your mother — or Dr. Fredman? Dr. Fredman, at least. He’s been — he’s like a family member, you know that, and he could have, or he would have… What were you thinking, for Christ’s sake?”

Thinking? She wasn’t thinking anything, not then and not now. All she wanted — and she didn’t care what they did to her, beat her, torture her, drag her weeping through the streets in a dirty white dress with “Baby Killer” stitched over her breast in scarlet letters — was to see Jeremy. Just that. Because what really mattered was what he was thinking.

—

The food at the Sarah Barnes Cooper Women’s Correctional Institute was exactly what they served at the dining hall in college, heavy on the sugars, starches, and bad cholesterol, and that would have struck her as ironic if she’d been there under other circumstances — doing community outreach, say, or researching a paper for her sociology class. But given the fact that she’d been locked up for more than a month now, the object of the other girls’ threats, scorn, and just plain nastiness, given the fact that her life was ruined beyond any hope of redemption, and every newspaper in the country had her shrunken white face plastered across its front page under a headline that screamed MOTEL MOM, she didn’t have much use for irony. She was scared twenty-four hours a day. Scared of the present, scared of the future, scared of the reporters waiting for the judge to set bail so that they could swarm all over her the minute she stepped out the door. She couldn’t concentrate on the books and magazines her mother brought her or even on the TV in the rec room. She sat in her room — it was a room, just like a dorm room, except that they locked you in at night — and stared at the walls, eating peanuts, M&M’s, sunflower seeds by the handful, chewing for the pure animal gratification of it. She was putting on more weight, and what did it matter?

Jeremy was different. He’d lost everything — his walk, his smile, the muscles of his upper arms and shoulders. Even his hair lay flat now, as if he couldn’t bother with a tube of gel and a comb. When she saw him at the arraignment, saw him for the first time since she’d climbed out of the car and limped into the dorm with the blood wet on her legs, he looked like a refugee, like a ghost. The room they were in — the courtroom — seemed to have grown up around them, walls, windows, benches, lights and radiators already in place, along with the judge, the American flag and the ready-made spectators. It was hot. People coughed into their fists and shuffled their feet, every sound magnified. The judge presided, his arms like bones twirled in a bag, his eyes searching and opaque as he peered over the top of his reading glasses.

China’s lawyer didn’t like Jeremy’s lawyer, that much was evident, and the state prosecutor didn’t like anybody. She watched him — Jeremy, only him — as the reporters held their collective breath and the judge read off the charges and her mother bowed her head and sobbed into the bucket of her hands. And Jeremy was watching her too, his eyes locked on hers as if he defied them all, as if nothing mattered in the world but her, and when the judge said “First-degree murder” and “Murder by abuse or neglect,” he never flinched.

She sent him a note that day—“I love you, will always love you no matter what, More than Moon”—and in the hallway, afterward, while their lawyers fended off the reporters and the bailiffs tugged impatiently at them, they had a minute, just a minute, to themselves. “What did you tell them?” he whispered. His voice was a rasp, almost a growl; she looked at him, inches away, and hardly recognized him.

“I told them it was dead.”

“My lawyer — Mrs. Teagues? — she says they’re saying it was alive when we, when we put it in the bag.” His face was composed, but his eyes were darting like insects trapped inside his head.

“It was dead.”

“It looked dead,” he said, and already he was pulling away from her and some callous shit with a camera kept annihilating them with flash after flash of light, “and we certainly didn’t — I mean, we didn’t slap it or anything to get it breathing….”

And then the last thing he said to her, just as they were pulled apart, and it was nothing she wanted to hear, nothing that had any love in it, or even the hint of love: “You told me to get rid of it.”

—

There was no elaborate name for the place where they were keeping him. It was known as Drum Hill Prison, period. No reform-minded notions here, no verbal gestures toward rehabilitation or behavior modification, no benefactors, mayors or role models to lend the place their family names, but then who in his right mind would want a prison named after him anyway? At least they kept him separated from the other prisoners, the gangbangers and dope dealers and sexual predators and the like. He was no longer a freshman at Brown, not officially, but he had his books and his course notes, and he tried to keep up as best he could. Still, when the screams echoed through the cellblock at night and the walls dripped with the accumulated breath of eight and a half thousand terminally angry sociopaths, he had to admit it wasn’t the sort of college experience he’d bargained for.