Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

My heart is beating in the back of my throat. “Ruth,” I manage. I gesture to the empty mattress. “So this is…”

“Yeah, whatever. I don’t give a shit, as long as you stay out of my stuff.”

I jerk my head, agreeing, and make the bed as Wanda watches. “You from around here?”

“East End.”

“I’m from Bantam. You ever been there?” I shake my head. “No one’s ever been to Bantam. This your first time?”

I glance up, confused. “In Bantam?”

“In prison .”

“Yes, but I won’t be here for long. I’m waiting for my bail to clear.”

Wanda laughs. “Okay, then.”

Slowly, I turn. “What?”

“I’ve been waiting for the same thing. Going on three weeks now.”

Three weeks . I feel my knees buckle, and I sink to the mattress. Three weeks? I tell myself that my situation is not Wanda’s. But all the same: three weeks .

“So what are you in for?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“It’s amazing how nobody in here did anything illegal.” Wanda lies back on her bunk, stretching her arms up over her head. “ They say I killed my husband. I say he ran into my knife.” She looks at me. “It was an accident. You know, like the way he broke my arm and gave me a black eye and pushed me down the stairs and those were accidents too.”

There are stones in her voice. I wonder if, in time, mine will sound that way, too. I think of Kennedy, telling me to keep to myself.

I think of Turk Bauer and picture the tattoo I saw in the courtroom, blazing across his shaved scalp. I wonder if he has spent time in prison. If this means we, too, have something in common.

Then I picture his baby, curled in my arms in the morgue, cold and blue as granite.

“I don’t believe in accidents,” I say, and I leave it at that.

–

THE COUNSELOR, OFFICER Ramirez, is a man with a face as round and soft as a donut, who is slurping his soup. He keeps spilling on his shirt, and I try not to look every time it happens. “Ruth Jefferson,” he says, reading my file. “You had a question about visitation?”

“Yes,” I reply. “My son, Edison. I need to get in touch with him, so that he knows how to get together the papers we need for bail. He’s only seventeen.”

Ramirez rummages in his desk. He takes out a magazine- Guns & Ammo -and a stack of flyers about depression, and then hands me a form. “Write down the name and address of the people you want on the visitor list.”

“And then what?”

“Then I mail it out and when they sign it and send it back, the form gets approved and you’re good to go.”

“But that could take weeks.”

“About ten days, usually,” Ramirez says. Slurrrrp .

Tears flood into my eyes. This is like a nightmare, the kind where someone shakes your shoulder as you are telling yourself this is a dream, and says, This isn’t a dream. “I can’t leave him alone that long.”

“I can contact child protective services-”

“No!” I blurt out. “Don’t.”

Something makes him put down his spoon and look at me, not unkindly. “There’s always the warden. He can grant you a courtesy visit for two adult visitors before the official application is processed. But given that your son is seventeen, he’d have to come in the company of another adult.”

Adisa, I think. And then, immediately, I remember why she’ll never be approved by the warden for a visit: she has a record, thanks to a forged rent check five years back.

I push the form back across the desk to him. The walls feel like the shutter of a camera closing. “Thank you anyway,” I manage, and I walk back to my cell.

Wanda is sitting on her bunk, nibbling on a Twix bar. She takes one look at me, then breaks off a tiny piece and offers it.

I take it in my hand and close my fist around it. The chocolate starts to melt.

“No phone call?” Wanda asks, and I shake my head. I sit on my bunk, and then turn away from her, so that I am facing the wall.

“It’s time for Judge Judy, ” she says. “You want to watch?”

When I don’t respond, I hear Wanda pad out of our cell, presumably toward the rec room. I lick the candy from my hand and then press my palms together and talk to the only slice of hope I have left. God, I pray, please, please be listening .

–

WHEN I WAS little, I used to have sleepovers with Christina at her brownstone. We would unroll our sleeping bags in the living room and Sam Hallowell would run a movie projector with old cartoons that he must have gotten when he was a television executive. This was, back then, a big deal-there were no VCRs or video on demand; a private screening was a treat reserved for movie stars-and, I guess, their children. Although I was skittish about being away from home for the night, this was the next best thing: Mama would run the bath for us and get me into my pajamas and make a treat of hot cocoa and cookies before she left; and by the time we woke up, she was already back and making us pancakes.

Whatever differences there were between Christina and me grew more indelible as we got older. It was harder to pretend that it didn’t matter my mama worked for hers; or that I had to work after school while she became a striker for the soccer team; or that the clothes I wore on Casual Fridays used to belong to Christina. It wasn’t that she was unfriendly to me. The barricade was built with my own suspicions, one brick of embarrassment at a time. Christina’s friends were all blond, pretty, athletic, fanning around her like the matching spokes of a snowflake; if I didn’t hang around their edges, I told myself, it was because I didn’t want Christina to feel like she had to include me. The real reason I distanced myself, though, was because it hurt less to step away than to risk that inevitable moment where I would become an afterthought.

The only problem with dissociating myself from Christina was that I didn’t have many other friends. There was a Pakistani exchange student, and a girl with cataracts that I tutored in math, but what we had in common was the fact that we didn’t really fit in anywhere else. There was a cluster of other Black kids, but their upbringing was still a world away from mine-with their parents who were stockbrokers and fencing lessons and summer cottages on Nantucket. There was Rachel-who was eighteen now and pregnant with her first child. She probably needed a friend, but even when we were face-to-face across the kitchen table, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her, because the things she wanted out of her life were so different from what I hoped for in my own, and because-honestly-I was a little scared that if I started hanging around with her, all the stereotypes she’d wrapped herself in would rub off like shoe polish and make it even harder to fit in seamlessly in the halls of Dalton.

So maybe that’s why, when Christina invited me to a slumber party she was having one Friday, I said yes before I could remember to stop myself. I said yes, and hoped that she would prove me gloriously wrong. In the company of all these new friends of hers, I wanted to share our inside jokes about the time Christina and I made helmets out of tinfoil and hid in the dumbwaiter pretending it was a spaceship to the moon; or when Ms. Mina’s dog, Fergus, pooped on her bed and we used white paint to cover the stain, certain no one would ever notice. I wanted to be the only one who knew which kitchen cabinet held the snacks and where the extra bedding was kept and the names of each of Christina’s old stuffed animals. I wanted everyone else to know that Christina and I had been friends even longer than they had.

Christina had invited two other sophomores-Misty, who claimed to be dyslexic to get accommodations on homework, but who seemed to have no trouble reading aloud from the stack of Cosmo magazines that Christina had brought onto the roof deck; and Kiera, who was obsessed with Rob Lowe and her own thigh gap. We had all stretched out towels out on the teak deck. Christina turned up the radio as a Dire Straits song came on and started singing all the lyrics by heart. I thought of how we used to play Ms. Mina’s records-all original Broadway cast recordings-and dance around pretending to be Cinderella or Eva Perón or Maria von Trapp.