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“Actually, it’s rather nice,” he said. “I hang out at the Art Institute, read a lot—I really sort of wish I never had to work again.”
“Did you hear about the KTD? It’s going to stay open.”
“For now,” he said. “It got a reprieve, not a pardon.”
“But you helped. That ought to make you feel good. You did something, and it helped.”
His familiar light laugh trickled over the wire from Chicago. “You’re sweet, Martha, but no. What I did didn’t help a goddamn bit.”
School has started, but they won’t let me go back yet; they’re waiting to see how Judge Horner resolves my case. That’s fine with me, because it means I have the dormitory room to myself during the day. Mr. Lowry brought me some textbooks, and every now and then I look through them. But mostly I’ve used the time to write—that’s where all this comes from. In the late afternoon, after school has let out and the kids are coming back, I hide the pages under the mattress. We eat at six, spend an hour and a half at study time and have to be in bed, with the lights out, by nine. Someone always comes around to check. Then I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling. Usually it takes hours to fall asleep.
On nights like that, I can’t help thinking about the past, wondering about it all. I remember something Bunny said last winter, after she’d bounced a check and they’d shut off our electricity. We came home to a dark and icy house, and I was furious. “How can you be so careless?” I demanded. “How can you live like this?” Bunny just smiled. “Because of you,” she said. “Everything’s possible because of you.” At the time, I didn’t really understand. She’d just started going out with Eddie, and I thought her new love was making her larky. But lately, thinking about it, I’ve begun to see what she meant. As long as we had each other, nothing else really mattered. The checks could bounce, the boyfriends could disappear, Tom could even go to jail—in the end, we always had each other.
Lying here in the darkened room, listening to the slow, snorting breaths of Crazy Mary on the bed a few feet away, I try to bring back that old feeling, to make things the way they were just a month ago. But it doesn’t work. I still love Bunny with all my heart, but I know now that love like hers is dangerous. It makes you a little crazy.
Sometimes, though, if I’m still awake when the midnight whistle blows over at the KTD, I play a little game with myself. I imagine that I’m free from here, and I’ve gone to pick up Bunny. As a present, I bring her the old shoes that I bought in Minniefield. They’re just right for her—as special and romantic as she is. She loves the shoes and tries them on right there in the hospital, parading around the ward, showing them off to the bewildered patients, coming back again and again to hold me in her arms. “A perfect child,” she tells everyone. “A perfect child.” And then I pick up the battered old suitcase in which she’s packed her things, and we walk down the marble stairs and out the heavy front door. The day is cloudless, and the air smells of mowed grass. Outside the hospital, across the street, a huge meadow spreads out, with low hills in the distance. Bunny and I walk toward them, talking the way we’ve always talked, touching occasionally, lost in each other, until, in my imagination, we’re two tiny dots disappearing into the perfect green horizon, and I drift off into a sweet sleep.
For Gioia
