“Does that mean anything to you?” When I shake my head, she frowns. “Because I was confused. I mean, my grandparents had a place in Spring Lake when she was little, and I thought, like, maybe she was so messed up on the morphine or whatever that it made her young again in her head. So I just said,Yeah, okay, Mom, you go to the beach, you go right ahead.” Her chin wobbles. “And then she squeezed my hand again, and she closed her eyes, and that was it. She was out before the doctor came in. And by morning…”
She trails off while I think as hard as I can.
Jersey. Jersey. What the hell does any of this have to do with Jersey…?
Or is it possible that she didn’t say Jersey at all? Caroline doesn’t seem certain.
But if not Jersey, then what? Juicy? Drowsy? Cozy? None of that makes any damn sense, either.
I just can’t shake the feeling that the answer is right on the tip of my tongue.
“I don’t know what that means, if anything,” I tell her. “But if she came back to say it to you, then it’s not nothing.”
“No.” She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “It’s not.”
There’s not much to discuss after that. Caroline walks me to the door and we exchange awkward goodbyes. The whole time, I’m turning those syllables over in my head again and again.
Jersey. Jer-sey. Jerz-E.
Whatever it means, Susan Oglethorpe used her last conscious breath to say it. She wouldn’t have wasted that chance. She said it because someone, eventually, might come asking.
That someone is me.
I press my palm against my breast pocket and feel the soft crease of the sonogram beneath the wool. Seventy hours to go, give or take.
Time, as Lukas pointed out, is not a luxury I have. But a key in my pocket is more than I had this morning.
It’s a start.
46
CASS
I know bruises. I know how to get them, how to hide them, and how they look when they fade. So when I look at the thin mattress lying on my cell cot and see it’s the color of a three-day old bruise, I almost feel at home.
I don’t sit down on it right away. Instead, I measure the cell with my feet. Heel, toe, heel, toe, until I run out of floor and have to turn around.
Besides the cot, there is a stainless steel toilet with no seat and… that’s it. My walk-in closet is bigger than this.
I didn’t think I’d miss that closet. It was the site of so many bad memories. I remember how it felt to have my face smashed against the Schumacher fern wallpaper Raymond hated. I told the decorators to put it up anyway, a small act of marital rebellion before I graduated to bigger ones, like, oh,conspiring to commit homicide.
Which has clearly gone really well for me, as we all can see.
I start laughing, but it doesn’t take long before that turns into crying. Eventually, the crying knocks me off my feet and I end up curled on the mattress like a question mark, sheltering my unborn baby against all the wrongs of the world.
I make sure I cry quietly, though. I learned that one a long time ago, with Raymond. You cry into a pillow, into a sleeve, into the running water in the shower. You do not let him hear you. You do not give him the satisfaction of the sound.
Old habits. They serve a girl well in jail.
I don’t even know exactly why I’m crying. Just overwhelm, probably. I mean, Raymond’s dead, right? Mission accomplished! Shouldn’t I be celebrating?
But this doesn’t feel like any victory I ever imagined.
With one hand tucked under my cheek and the other tucked between my thighs, I watch the light in the high small window above me darken from yellow to gray to a fading lavender. As I do, I think of Giana.
I don’t choose a bad memory. Not the one with the bruises blooming along the top of her breast, or the closed casket, or the marble bathtub. I’ve spent five years marinating in those. At this point, they’re cooked all the way through.
Instead, I think of the night I had strep throat in seventh grade. Mom was on a double at the hospital and Dad was upstairs being useless, so Giana came into my room and laid down on top of the covers next to me, all dressed up to go somewhere I now know she didn’t want to go. She laid a cool palm against my throat.
