The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (14 page)

“M
innow, you have to try harder to control these outbursts,” Mrs. New says.

I'm in her office again, in the wooden chair opposite her desk. I feel groggy and itchy, but I can't figure out where. Like it's my soul that itches.

“Are you gonna suspend me from reading class?” I ask.

“Your teacher has made the case that you be given leniency,” she says. “And I think I agree with her. This isn't the first time you've left a counseling session in distress. I'm going to recommend you begin seeing another counselor.”

“No!” I bark.

“Why not?”

“Because it's my choice. You said it was my choice. Well, I choose him.”

“Look what happened, Minnow,” she says in a measured tone. “Look what you've done to yourself.”

I look down at my arms. They're twined with white bandages. Beneath, the purple of new bruises are visible up to my elbows. The skin around my stumps pulled apart, so in the infirmary, they had to use staples.

“You put staples in me?” I remember asking the nurse after I woke up from sedation.

“It's routine,” she said.

“Staples?” I asked. “Let me see them. No, I don't want to. God, this place is nuts.” They put something on my tongue that melted away like powder and I went very relaxed. I didn't care as much about the staples anymore.

“I did this to myself,” I say to Mrs. New. “Not Dr. Wilson. He was just trying to help.” The words still taste bitter in my mouth, but I swallow them because I need to see him again, to get him off the trail of my mother and Constance and Waylon and Jude.

“You could've seriously injured yourself.” She shakes her head. “As it is, Dr. Wilson will be taking an indeterminate break from your case while another caseworker evaluates his progress.”

“For how long?” I ask, trying to push through the fog the pill covered me in.

“However long it takes.”

I don't move. My muscles are locked in loose submission. My bottom lip nestles under my top, and I cry.

• • •

For the rest of the day, I stare at the Post-it on my affirmation wall.
Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart.
I've read it so many times, I think I believe it. Today, there was something else in my heartbeat. There was a skirmish. There was a fight.

“Angel, what do you miss the most?”

Angel hangs her head over her bunk. “I miss Pop-Tarts,” she says. “And Mountain Dew, and real pizza, and oh, fried chicken. I miss that the most.”

“No people?” I ask.

She shakes her head, the tails of her cornrows flicking side to side. “Not a soul,” she says. “People like me, we don't look back. Only forward.”

“Are you ever gonna tell me how long you're serving?”

“Do you think I'll tell you anything about that with you lying on your bed all mopey and sad-looking? You'd burst into tears.”

“Fine,” I say. “Be that way.”

She disappears back to her bunk. After a moment, I hear her ask, “Are you trying to get me to ask you who you miss?”

“Maybe.”

“All right,” she says. “Who do you miss?”

“My grandpa,” I say.

She slides off of her bed and stands in front of me. “I thought for sure you'd say Jude.”

I shake my head. Jude is beyond missing. He's in some other realm where his absence crouches always in the shadows, his hands pressed coldly to my heart.

“He was my father's father,” I say. “He's dead now, but I can't help thinking he wouldn't have let any of this happen. If he'd been stronger, if he'd lived, I think he might have saved all of us.”

I didn't know my grandparents well. My grandmother was a wrinkled peach of a thing who died when I was too little to think about it, but Grampy was around even after the Prophet showed up. He didn't say much when my father started talking about the new things he'd decided to believe in, but I could tell Grampy didn't like it by the way he'd go silent and hunch his shoulders, all of his muscles bunching up inside the loose skin he lived in.

I was five when he died. We waited for hours in the hospital, and I spent the entire time being fascinated with a sheet cake in the hospital waiting room. My father wouldn't let me eat any. He said it was
touched by the teeth of Gentiles
, or something. So I just stared at the chocolate insides marring the inches of white frosting and only the memory of a message scrawled in green on the top. It was a cake to celebrate someone getting better, being cured, leaving the hospital for good.

Grampy had been in a war years before when, on a foreign street, out of nowhere, he got punched in the thigh by a speeding piece of metal from an exploded car. And here, years later, his leg began to die, the muscle turning to poison and killing him a little with every heartbeat.

In this room, we waited to hear how getting his leg cut off had gone.

I looked at my parents like they'd become new people, suddenly, morphed into misshapen versions of themselves. Things had been changing for a while, ever since the Prophet started stopping by, but this was the first time I'd seen them together outside our house. The fluorescent lights of the waiting room illuminated their strangeness, their apartness. Had my mother's lips always hung so slack? Had my father always had those livid blue veins that stabbed his eyes like pitchforks? My mother had quit her job by now, her swelling stomach stretching her gray shirt. My father's beard was nearly to the center of his chest. It must've been about a month before we'd leave for the woods.

When the surgeon came out, he closed the wooden door behind him and put on a face that was trying to look sincere, but really looked tired.

“I'm so sorry. Donald didn't make it.”

He explained how it happened. A bad thing grew out of the blood, formed a ball, and floated through his veins where it became jammed. Everything happened quickly after that.

My father's face was impenetrable. He stared straight ahead, eyes avoiding the surgeon.

“It might not be my business, but do you have a faith?” the doctor asked.

My father lifted his head. “Why?”

“It can help, sometimes, believing in something.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, do you believe people go to a better place when they die? To heaven?”

My father was pulling on his bottom lip. His face was full of extra skin that bagged bluely and made him look tired. “I don't know. I never asked.”

“Pardon?” the surgeon asked.

“I don't know if I believe that. I never . . . I haven't thought to ask about heaven.”

The surgeon's face wrinkled in confusion. He bowed slightly—“Again, I'm so sorry for your loss,”—and walked back through the wooden door.

They let us see Grampy's body. He looked surprisingly young, no wrinkles, just a big, white, inflated face. Someone'd tucked a pistachio-colored blanket up under his chin so all you could see was his head. I wanted to reach out my fingers and touch his cheek, but my mother smacked my hand away when I tried.

I don't remember her ever moving that quickly again. She operated in slow motion so much of the time. I think, had she been caught on film, you might've seen the wind ruffle her dress slower than everyone else's, her footsteps always taking an eternity to strike the ground.

I
t's claustrophobic here, but not like Jude always said cities would feel. What did he know anyway? He'd never been to one. He insisted the concrete and metal would crush a person, block out the light. But what's suffocating are the people. This feeling that too many sets of lungs are breathing right next to you. Like it's a finite resource, air. It can run out, and we're all breathing a little less well because we choose to live side by side with others. Some days I can barely catch my breath at all.

I haven't seen the sky, the real sky, not the muted one that shines through the milk-colored skylight, since I arrived in juvie. For the first couple of days after they found me, covered in Philip's blood, they had me so full of morphine in that hospital bed that all I could do was stare out the window and try to block out the yellow-tasting chemical smell that never went away. The bed was too soft. Somehow, it made everything ache worse.

A detective visited after I was coming out of the anesthetic fog of my second surgery. I had tolerated the surgeries numbly, let them move me and poke me and cut me. Before the plastic surgeon had his way with my arms, they spread my legs and stuck a needle in my femoral artery and injected dye to color my blood. On a screen, I watched the veins in my arms flash with yellow as the blood pumped, so much like branches of a tree, but all around the rim of my wrists, the screen was black. Dead.

In surgery, they did something to my stumps, undid the embroidery floss stitches and shaved off some bone and tried to sort out the broken nest of nerves and tendons. The surgeons patched a chunk of muscle and skin from my inner thighs onto each stump with a lacework of fine black sutures.

I woke up feeling unmoored and sick, ceiling lights battering my bruised eyelids. I could still smell smoke in my hair but couldn't remember where it had come from, and I couldn't piece together where Jude was. When the detective came in, I asked him over and over, but he only frowned as though he had no idea who Jude was, and looking back I guess he didn't.

“The place you called the Community has been destroyed,” he said. “We believe someone started a fire.”

My head snapped back against the pillows and in that second, all I could see was the Prophet's dying eyes, the heat from the fire pushing redness into his cheeks.

“Is there anybody who'd want your home destroyed?” he asked.

Me,
I thought, and shut my eyes hard again.

“What about your mother?” he asked. “Your father? Any of your siblings?”

“I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!” I repeated, more and more loudly each time.

“Do you have any idea how the fire started?” the detective asked.

All at once, the encompassing smell of smoke was too much. I leaned forward and vomited a pile of foamy yellow on the thready hospital blanket. And still the detective kept pushing with his questions, wanting more. Demanding more.

“Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?” I heard someone sing. The detective grew silent. The voice was high-pitched and broken with tears, like a sad angel. But I didn't believe in angels anymore.

“Not much money, oh but honey, ain't we got fun?” the voice continued. The detective's face screwed up in confusion. He heard the voice, too.

“The rent's unpaid dear, we haven't a bus, but smiles are made dear, for people like us.” My split lip shivered in pain, and I realized I was the one singing. I thought I might lose it right there because the world went white and depthless, like someone had suddenly packed my brain in cotton. They had to sedate me. I decided I didn't want it, so I struggled, and I pissed myself, and they called a big male nurse to come in and press hard on my shoulders till another nurse could stick the needle in the crook of my elbow.

I woke up after hours had passed, late in the evening. They'd changed my hospital gown. The detective was gone.

The male nurse entered my room at the end of his shift. I watched him as he leaned over and plugged something into the wall outlet.

“It's a night-light,” he said. “It'll help keep the darkness away.”

He flicked a switch, and the light blinked on. It was made of opaque, yellowed plastic in the shape of a rainbow. In the darkness, the light was brighter than any star out the window. It kept me awake every night, though I didn't sleep anyway, just stared at the smeared multicolor half-circle projected on the wall that had probably lit the rooms of thousands of children in the pediatric ward over the past twenty years.

The night before the final day of my trial, I pried open the hospital window and stared out. Even with the glass pushed aside, the night-light blurred out the stars. I sunk to my knees and shuffled to where the night-light was plugged into the wall. Carefully, I closed my mouth over the top of the rainbow, breathing in the hot plastic smell. I shut my eyes from the brightness, the inside of my eyelids turning rosy, and pulled till the light came unstuck from the wall.

The rainbow was hot in my mouth. It tasted like a toy I had when I was little, a plastic palm-sized fish my father got me for my fourth birthday. He told me it was a minnow, though it was larger than a real minnow. Prettier. Brighter eyes.

I carried the night-light to the window and opened my mouth, watching it fall through the green light of traffic signals. The sound it made as it collided with the pavement was almost disappointing. A clatter. Barely an indication it existed at all.

With the light gone, I could see now. Below was a parking lot edged by a clutch of maples and the road that led first to the river, then to houses whose stones must have been stolen from the mountains. Farther out lay those mountains. And beyond them, stars. Whole galaxies of them hanging like a mobile above the pines where I spent my childhood. I had lived beside those trees for twelve years. But, from here, I could make out only a general sense of green. I found I didn't care about them. If I hadn't had my eyes trained on them, they might've only been a starless piece of sky.

D
r. Wilson hasn't been seen in Cell Block 3 of the female juvenile detention unit in the Missoula Correctional Department's finest yellow-brick, piss-smelling facility for two weeks. I can see now I'd begun to enjoy his visits, the way he's so different from everyone inside, not just because he dresses in real clothes and smells nothing like bleach, but because he is always, always calm. In jail, at any moment, you're never farther than ten feet from someone completely losing their shit. He's left me to deal with this place all on my own. I am certain he is never coming back.

With Dr. Wilson gone, there is no diversion from the everyday tedium of this place. Each day is the same routine, the same hallways, the same meals. The same drumming thoughts. I think about the regular people I saw from my window at the hospital, walking through hip-height snow berms, their faces obscured by scarves, but their eyes bright and unafraid. Always unafraid. I wondered how they could afford such bravery. Didn't they peep out of their real glass windows at the hills circling them like baited wolves and squirm in their houses at night?

How could I ever be unafraid like them?

Beyond this jail is the city I dreamed about. I can sense it, even through these concrete walls. Why, now, is it so much less fascinating than I always imagined? Somewhere, I chant to the inside of my skull, is an old man swinging loaves of bread. And the woman in a coral-colored blouse taking a bus to work. I loved that woman, dreamed of being just like her, getting a job tapping on the keys of some big, gray computer keyboard in an office like the one my mother worked in once. Except computers don't look like they did in my daydreams anymore, and even from far away the gasket sound city buses make terrifies me. The world is nothing like I imagined.

• • •

Angel returns to the cell at the end of the day with new worksheets shoved loose in her binder, which she drops unceremoniously on the floor before grabbing her book and climbing to her bunk. She stops and peers down at me.

“Why do you look like such a mope?” she asks.

“Dr. Wilson's gone,” I say. “He hasn't come by for weeks.”

“Good girl,” she says. “Maybe he's gone for good.”

An unexpected pang stabs my chest. “He can't be,” I say. “My parole meeting comes up in August, when I turn eighteen. If I'm going to get out, I need him to recommend me.”

“You don't seriously think you'll get parole,” she says.

I look up at her. “What?”

“I'm just being realistic,” she says, and I try to see it through her eyes—I almost killed Philip. What could I ever say to convince the board? To convince anyone?

“Have you been up for parole?” I ask.

“Once.”

“What's it like?”

“Boring. They talk for like five hours before they even hear your case, and by the time you get to sit in front of them, they already know everything about you. They ask you a couple questions, and you get this idea that your answers actually matter, but they don't. And then they roundtable, and they tell you parole has been denied.”

“What if a staff member stands up for you?”

“Who knows? I've never heard of that happening. The staff has nothing to gain. And none of them gets to know us well enough to come up with compelling evidence. We're just sheep to them. We're just paper to be pushed around.”

I think of Miss Bailey and Benny and Dr. Wilson, and want to argue with her, but then I wonder how much I really matter to any of them. How much they actually care.

“What about Benny?” I ask. “You two are close.”

“She might do it, if I asked her. But I'll get denied every time. Some cases—yours, mine—it's too black-and-white for them. No amount of good behavior or promises or Bible quotes will erase how they see us.”

I nod and rest my head on my knee.

“Minnow,” she says solemnly, “please don't convince yourself you stand a chance. You're going to Billings, and next year I'll join you there.”

The short-term girls talk about Billings, trying to scare us with stories of rapists and meth-whores who'll stab you for looking at them out of the wrong eye. But the long-term girls whisper about how much better things will be at Billings, finding any reason to avoid thinking about the stories they've heard. They talk about how the uniform is actual clothes—box-shaped burgundy T-shirts and khakis, not jumpsuits. They say inmates with good behavior are given a stray dog to care for. They say some of the guards are even men.

“Can't wait,” I mutter just as the bell rings for dinner.

• • •

When we arrive in the cafeteria, Mrs. New stands at the front beside a tall, lean woman in a gray suit.

“The warden,” I hear hissed around me. The gray-clad woman observes the girls in a removed way, as though watching us from the top of a guard tower with a rifle in her hands. Her short hair is pulled back in a stiff ponytail, blades of dyed blond fanning from her hairline unnaturally. Her skin is powdery and severely pale.

Nobody knows her actual name, the others tell me, and she only shows her face when something really bad's happened.

“Last time the warden was here,” Angel mutters once we're seated with our food, “she was telling us outdoor rec time was canceled because some girl hung herself with a tetherball.”

“And the time before that,” Rashida pipes up, “that girl Roxanne tried to escape by holding on to the underside of one of the buses, and she got smeared all over a speed bump in the parking lot.”

“We could see it from science class,” another girl says. “Guts everywhere.”

The warden steps up to a mounted microphone and clears her throat loudly. The room falls instantly silent.

“Good evening,” the warden says in a clipped voice.

“Good evening,” we repeat.

“I'm here with some wonderful news. After two years of being closed to new applicants, the Bridge Program has opened several spots and will be accepting applications for admission.”

An excited mumbling breaks out among the girls.

The warden clears her throat again. “The competition will be steep,” she says. “Every warden in every juvenile facility in Montana is making a similar announcement today. Nevertheless, each of you is encouraged to apply. Mrs. New will distribute applications to the writing teachers.”

“What's she talking about?” I ask, turning to Angel.

“It's this program that gives you a place to live and pays for everything after you're released. They let you stay as long as you need to finish college and get a job. That's why spots hardly ever open up.”

“Like a group home?” I ask.

“Like a really nice group home where you never have to worry about anything. Like a group home you'd actually want to live in.”

A dozen hands dart in the air, and the warden spends about five minutes answering questions. Yes, everything is paid for. Yes, even college. Yes, even food. No, not alcohol, and that's not even remotely funny.

A mousy blond girl with bones like a bird's and a belly the size of a watermelon raises her hand.

Yes, the warden says, the Bridge Program houses and pays for the girls' dependents, too, if they have any. The blond girl's face breaks open in a smile, her hand widening over her ballooned stomach.

“This is so fucked,” Angel whispers.

I turn to look at her. Her face is set in a scowl. “What?” I ask.

“She actually thinks she'll get in,” Angel says.

I follow Angel's gaze to the blond girl. Her wide-set eyes are hopeful, and almost every girl in the cafeteria has the same expression. They whisper to one another with cupped hands as the warden answers more questions about entry requirements. And it dawns on me what a horrible trick this actually is, what a cruelty. Most of them won't make the cut.

“I take it you're not applying?” I ask, though I know the answer.

She scoffs. “I stand a better chance at the Nobel Prize.”

The warden explains that only girls released or granted parole by their eighteenth birthday will be eligible for the program. Angel will go adult prison after this. For a long time, I'm guessing. And, I'm realizing, probably so will I.