46. Cass
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.
“Poor baby,” she said. “ You sound like a frog with emphysema.”
She had somewhere to be, but she stayed anyway. She read me three chapters of The Westing Game , doing all the funny accents wrong on purpose so I’d laugh and stop touching the lump in my throat. When she thought I was asleep, she kissed my hairline and whispered, “ I’m always here, dummy. Always.”
I close my eyes against the window’s last light.
I’m always here, dummy.
Always.
… But you know who isn’t here, right?
No. I can’t think of him. It hurts too much.
I press a hand low on my belly and let the dark take me.